Compendium of Lost Moments
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Random moments plucked from the centuries-long lives of Temperance Brennan, Angel, Max Keenan and others inhabiting Dharmasera's Angel/Bones crossover universe. Now rated "M."
1. A New Morning Routine

**A Compendium of Lost Moments**

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**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128  
**Rated: **T  
**Disclaimer: **_We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own._

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**Summary: **_Random moments plucked from the centuries-long lives of Temperance Brennan, Angel, Max Keenan and others inhabiting Dharmasera's Angel/Bones crossover universe (the other stories from which have posted under **Lesera128**'s profile)._

**A/N: **_Dharmasera, Inc. wanted to prove, once again, that we are capable of writing chapters that can be read in the course of a fifteen minute coffee- or tea-break. There is no rhyme or reason to this collection aside from the fact that all chapters are self-contained one-shots that feature Angel, Brennan, or other characters from our Angel/Bones crossover series. These pieces, since they are completely taken out of context, will include a dateline so you know where/when we're talking about. Sound like fun? We think it is._

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**Chapter 1: "A New Morning Routine"**

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**Chicago ~ Armistice Day, 1923**

Angel's eyes fluttered open and, for several seconds, he felt a swirl of panic as he tried to figure out where he was. The first thing he noticed was the way the warm, faintly lavender scented sheets felt like liquid silk against his cool skin, and he was cocooned in a warm goosedown duvet with a dark maroon corduroy cover. There were four large, square plump, firmly stuffed pillows scattered around the head of the king-sized bed, two of them on her side of the bed and one on his side, with a fourth minding the middle, braced up against Brennan's stack of two.

He blinked a couple of times and glanced over at the clock gently ticking on the wall opposite the bed. It was a few minutes past nine o'clock, and he could see a tiny crack of sunlight peeking through the heavy, tightly-drawn matching burgundy drapes. A smile broke his face as he remembered waking her up around four the night before, pulling the drapes open so he could see the moonlight on her ivory skin as they made sleepy, languid love, the soft ticking of the clock drowned out by the sound of her sighs and moans as she shattered beneath him. A low hum sounded in his throat as he remembered how good she felt around him, but his attention was suddenly drawn back to the present as he heard a clattering in the kitchen outside that made him finally sit up in bed.

"Bren?" he called out, his voice clear but hesitant on the edges as he threw the covers off his hip, exposing his skin to the cool air of the autumn morning.

"Out here," she called back, her reply firm in its instant response. "If you're getting up, I'll put the kettle back on for your tea," she added in a casually upbeat voice.

"Okay," he replied, pushing the bedroom door open with his hand and greeting her with a smile as he stood naked in the doorway, watching her flit around the kitchen in her black silk robe, her hair twisted into a mess of knots that she'd later unwind into luxurious pin curls that would make her shiny auburn hair seem even more voluminous than it already was.

"You just going to stand there all morning?" she asked with a crooked grin as her eyes devoured the sight of him.

"Would you like me to?" he retorted, returning her grin with a cocky one of his own.

"I would," she admitted, "but I do have to get going. I have an eleven o'clock meeting with Dr. Breasted at the Oriental Institute, and I really should—"

She stopped abruptly when she realized Angel had disappeared from the doorway. Her breath caught in her throat as she wondered if she'd somehow said something wrong, but a wave of relief washed over her when he reappeared, clad in a snug-fitting white tank T-shirt and a pair of brown wool trousers with suspenders.

He wandered into the kitchen with deliberate, sleepy steps. Although his body took the form of a man's, the struggle with which he moved around in the morning betrayed the full extent of his nocturnal nature.

Brushing past her with a smile as she handed him two bags of Irish breakfast tea, he walked over to her cabinet and opened it, reaching for what had quickly become his favorite of all her coffee cups—and for all of the lovely china cup and saucer sets she had, Angel preferred to take his tea in a bigger, more robust coffee cup rather than a dainty, floral-patterned teacup—just as the copper kettle on the stove began to whistle. Angel yanked the noisy kettle off the stove and poured the boiling water over his two bags of tea, glancing up to catch Brennan looking at him.

"What?" he said as he set the kettle on the back of the stove.

"I still can't quite believe you're here, _with _me, after all this time and that you're staying," she said, walking up behind him and snaking her slender arm around his waist as she leaned in and placed a soft kiss on the nape of his neck. "You really aren't going anywhere."

Angel turned his head and grinned at her, a sparkle in his dark brown eyes as she kissed his cheek, dotted with a faint morning stubble. "Nope, I'm sure not," he told her with a small kiss on her lips. He then added with a wry smile as he pulled away and confessed, "I'm still getting used to the idea myself." He flashed his eyebrow and licked his lip as he saw the soft curve of her bosom disappear under the gaping neckline of her Chinese silk robe, then added with a quiet laugh, "But I'm pretty sure I'll find a way to adapt somehow.

"Hmmm," she murmured, tickling his belly button with her finger as she pulled her arm away and turned to make her way back to the bedroom to get ready. "What are you going to do today?" she asked. "You know, while I'm out..."

Angel dunked his teabags in his cup as he followed her into the bedroom. "I don't know," he said wistfully. "Guess I'll get a bit more sleep, then read some. Do you have time to go down to the corner and grab me a copy of the _Tribune _before you go to meet with the professor? Because, uhh, well..."

Brennan sat down at her vanity and reached back to remove a curler, unwinding it from her hair before turning to him with a smile. "I know, Angel," she said. "And yes, I think I'll have time to do that before I head down to the University."

"Thanks," he said, unable to suppress a smile as he watched her remove the brown bobby pins from her hair one at a time. He was fascinated by the process she followed to get ready each morning, and though he would never admit it to her, he was grateful she allowed him to watch. "I really appreciate that, Bren," he told her.

"You're quite welcome,"she said, setting the last of her curlers down in the little wicker basket before reaching for her brush. "You know, Angel. I'm very happy right now...I'm very glad that you're here, with me, and that you're staying."

"Me, too," he replied from his perch, leaning against the doorframe. "Me, too..."

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**A/N: **_So there you have it, the first entry into our Compendium series. _

_Next up, another pairing in a piece entitled "The Houseguest."_

_Let us know what you think. If this were an ordinary Dharmasera chapter, you'd still be only 1/4 the way through our chapter, so we think you can afford to invest a tiny bit of that extra time into leaving a review. Pretty please? *blinks prettily*_

_Pretty, pretty please? _

_Thanks in advance! We love you guys and appreciate your readership._


	2. The Houseguest

**A Compendium of Lost Moments**

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**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128

**Rated: **T

**Disclaimer: **_We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own._

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**A/N: **_The following little yarn answers the question, "Why was Angel staying at the Hyperion Hotel in 1952?" (Angel episode tag 2x02, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?")_

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**Chapter 2: "The Houseguest"**

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**Los Angeles ~ October 5, 1952**

"_Nobody on, nobody out. And Reynolds nods at the pitch signal from Berra…There's the pitch…and the swing…and bam! Jackie Robinson slams one out to right. And now that baby's gone—"_

Angel sat in his easy chair holding a high-ball glass of chilled blood. He took a long sip as he listened to the tinny, disembodied voice warbling out of the television in the corner of the room, then turned and set his glass on the end table next to his chair.

For a moment, he stared at the glass of blood. It was human blood, type O-positive, bought through a middleman who sold them discretely to his customers four pints at a time, which meant Angel had to keep his purchases refrigerated. Between the fact that the blood wasn't warm and the anticoagulant sodium citrate that had been added to it, it didn't taste quite the way it should, but he figured it was better that way. After Lawson—feeding on him and turning him less than a decade earlier, even though his reasons for doing it were justifiable—he simply couldn't bear to taste human blood if it actually tasted like what it was...usually.

There was only one exception to that rule.

But, then again, she always was the exception.

_Always had been_, Angel thought with a wry smile that appeared on his face whenever he thought of her. _And probably always will be._

Sometimes when he was with Brennan, and she was feeling particularly passionate, she would let him feed on her while he was inside of her. He never, ever asked her for it, but somehow, she knew—she always knew when he needed that kind of intimacy, the kind only she could give him, and so she offered, sometimes badgered him into it, really, until she did what she'd always done with him and pushed him too far until he cracked—and that was the only time he let himself taste the warm tingle of human blood on his tongue.

He loved the way she tasted: so smooth, like sweet liquid silk the way her blood felt on his tongue, sliding down his throat, warming him from the inside out as he filled himself with her essence in the moments before he filled her with his.

Angel smiled at the thought of her, then frowned a little as he looked at the glass, slick with condensation as the cold liquid drew the moisture from the air. He glanced into the kitchen and stared for a moment at his refrigerator. He'd grown used to chilled blood over the years, having bought it off the black market and kept it in the icebox when he lived in New York in the '30s and '40s, but the refrigerator was still a novelty to him, a new aspect of his life since moving out to California the year before. He still hadn't grown used to the creaking, humming noises it made. It grated on him, so he kept the radio on almost all the time, just to drown out the sound of the fridge.

Reaching over, he ripped open a new pack of Salems and tucked one of the cigarettes between his lips as he flicked his Zippo open roughly and lit it. He closed his eyes and drew a mouthful of the cool menthol smoke, holding it for a moment before letting it swirl in his throat and blow out in thin streams through his nostrils.

Smoking was a nervous habit of sorts, one he'd picked up in the summer of 1944 as he'd spent his days sitting in his apartment in New York, listening to the radio reports of the Allied sweep through Normandy while he tried to flush his mind of the memory of his own contribution to the war effort—and the young ensign he'd turned to a vampire in the process. Once he'd started, it became part of his nightly routine to buy bottled blood and cigarettes from the butcher who ran a sandwich counter off Bleecker Street. Along with Irish whiskey, it was one of his few vices that he actually allowed himself to indulge in every so often.

Brennan didn't like it—she had made a comment to that effect the last time she'd visited him on the way back to Chicago from a dig at Brahmagiri in India—but it relaxed him, so he did it anyway. He remembered when she told him it was an unhealthy habit and how he'd laughed.

_"Bren," he told her with a grin. "It's not like I'm gonna get sick and die from doing it. Or catch a cold. I mean, so what?"_

Drawing another long drag on the cigarette, he sighed and flicked his ash in the brick-red Bakelite ashtray on the table. Because he couldn't draw the smoke all the way into his lungs the way humans could, he smoked his cigarettes hard and fast, more to occupy his hands and mouth than anything else, since the nicotine didn't affect him the way it did normal smokers.

_"It's relaxing," he'd told her. Brennan shook her head and rolled her eyes, then shot him a skeptical, narrow-eyed look. "Okay," he admitted. "The nicotine doesn't do much, but the whole..." He gestured wildly with his hands as he tried to explain himself. "I dunno, it's just the whole thing's kind of...a mindless distraction, I guess."_

_"Whatever, Angel," she replied with a laugh. "At least they're mentholated. Otherwise, I'm not even sure I'd want to kiss you." She smiled at him as he feigned a pout. _

_"You love kissing me," he said._

_"Maybe," she snickered back._

He brought the cigarette back to his lips to suck in another tingling mouthful of the minty-flavored smoke when the calm of the room was suddenly shattered.

"You gonna turn that up, kid?" Max Keenan asked as he came in from the guest bedroom in the back of Angel's apartment. "Game five, kid—tied at two games apiece. It's like a whole damn new series, right?"

Angel rolled his eyes and leaned his head back, blowing the smoke from his nostrils straight up in the air as another guttural sigh rattled from his throat. When he let his longtime lover talk him into letting her father stay with him at his apartment in Los Angeles, he'd no idea what he was getting himself into. But then again, he should've known better since he rarely, if ever, knew what he was getting into where Brennan was concerned or involved.

_Yeah_, Angel thought with a grimace. _I definitely should've known bettter._

She'd called him up a few weeks earlier, letting him know that her father—with whom Angel's relationship had always been uneasy, at best—was passing through L.A. on his way back to Chicago from a business trip to Las Vegas.

"_What the hell's he doing in Las Vegas?" Angel had asked her. "There's nothing there but sand, a couple of Mormon churches and some casinos."_

_He would have sworn he could hear her roll her eyes at him through the crackly phone line. "He's doing what everyone else is doing in Vegas." The line fell silent for a moment as if she were waiting for him to guess. "He's building a hotel. Or, rather, investing with a group of other men in a hotel-casino that's going up on The Strip. It's going to be called the Sahara."_

"_And he's going to be coming to L.A.?" he asked edgily. "Why?"_

_There was a beat of silence on the extension for a moment so that Angel thought the operator might've disconnected the call before Brennan's voice vaguely answered, "I'm not quite certain, but I believe it has something to do with an old friend in L.A. he wants to visit—"_

_Angel scowled even though Brennan couldn't see it. "So why can't he stay with her, then?" _

_"__Him__," she corrected him. "It's an old warlock friend of his, a man he's known for centuries who lives in Echo Park. And stop scowling, Angel—"_

_"I'm not scowling," he said defensively, his voice fading and sulking a bit as he realized she knew him well enough to know how he'd appear on the other end of the line._

_Another moment of crackly silence hung between them before Brennan said with what Angel sensed was a teasing smile in her voice, "So is this going to be a major imposition?"_

_Angel sighed audibly. "What, am I supposed to be Max's babysitter?"_

"_No," Brennan told him. "Not exactly."_

"_Then why ask me?" he questioned her. "Come on, Bren. You know me and your dad have never...well, why? What's the big deal? Can't the old sorcerer be trusted to mind himself for—"_

_"I don't trust that friend of his," Brennan interrupted him, a touch of seriousness coming into her voice. "And Dad's a warlock, not a sorcerer, okay? But don't get pissy. If you don't want to let him stay with you, just say so, and I'll make alternate arrangements, Angel." _

_She paused for a minute and then added in a softer voice, "You know that I, above all people, don't like to overstep my bounds. You know I wouldn't ask this of you if it wasn't important to me...very important. I don't like asking anyone for help, but I know that sometimes I have to let other people help me, and I trust you. So, please? Please help me?"_

_Angel felt a warmth spread through his chest at hearing her words. The scowl that had marred his normally handsome face softened a bit at her words as he realized the truth of them._

_"Bren..."_

_A soft hum vibrated deep inside of him, quietly reminding him that, despite the physical distance between them, she was always near. He felt her soul thrumming in his ears, and he knew he couldn't refuse her this small favor. Indeed, even if he hadn't known it yet, he'd already agreed to do it as soon as she asked him to let him help her. He knew what such a show of vulnerability, or what she perceived as weakness, cost her, and he knew that he couldn't disrespect it or disregard it or dismiss it so casually without hurting her, which was the last thing he wanted to do...ever._

_He held the phone's handset away from his ear for a few moments, sighed, then said quietly, "How long?"_

_"It's just for a couple of weeks. I doubt he'll even be around much. Dad will be out and about during the days and—"_

"_Fine," he said. _

Angel shoved his cigarette in his mouth and held it between his forefingers as he drew a long drag, filling his mouth and throat with the smoke as he watched Brennan's father plop down on the couch and set his beer bottle on the coffee table with a loud clank.

"You ever been to a baseball game, son?" Max asked him, looking at the younger man.

Angel closed his eyes for a moment, then plucked his cigarette from his lips before opening his eyes again and snorting. "Uhh, Max? I'm a vampire. I don't really do outdoor sporting events, okay?"

The old warlock arched an eyebrow and smirked. "I figured you might've tried a night game," he said.

With a grunt, Angel pulled the handle of his La-Z-Boy chair, extending the footrest and leaning back as far as the chair would go before reaching over for his glass of blood. He dangled his left arm over the edge of the armrest, not caring if a puff of ash fell onto the hardwood floor as he brought the glass to his lips and took a long drink.

"How 'bout we stop with the questions and just watch the damn game, alright?" Angel snapped, gesturing with a jerk of his chin towards the image on the television set as he snuffed out his quickly-smoked Salem in the ashtray. "I'm not much in the mood to talk, okay? I just want to watch the game, huh?"

Max stared at his daughter's longtime, erstwhile lover. He watched with narrow-eyed curiosity as Angel tipped back his glass, draining the last swallows of thick red blood with a single gulp. His eyes skimmed the hard lines of the vampire's face, along the younger man's heavy, acne-scarred jaw up to his high cheekbones and then to his eyes, dark and brooding. Beneath the melancholy, he knew there was a reservoir of anger and dangerousness, suppressed and restrained, but very much still there, and Max felt a flicker of protective concern as he thought about his daughter living with this man passing in and out of her life as he had for nearly a hundred years.

"Lemme guess—you're gonna root for the Yankees, right?" the old warlock said with a forced grin.

"No," the vampire said quietly. "Brooklyn."

"I thought you lived in the East Village when you lived in New York," Max said. "That's what Tempe told me. Most folks in Manhattan root for the Yankees or the Giants, not the Dodgers."

Angel pulled another cigarette from his already-dwindling pack of Salems. "I like Jackie Robinson," he said tersely, the filtered menthol waggling between his lips as he spoke. He lit the cigarette, took a short puff and pulled it out of his mouth as he leveled a hard stare at Brennan's father. "An outsider, beating 'em at their own game, you know."

A moment of silence hung between them as Max Keenan considered the point.

"My lady friend Stephanie is a big Yankees fan," he said after a bit. "She immigrated to the States six years ago, settled in New York, and she's damn near gone native. Native New Yorker, I mean."

"That's great," Angel grumbled.

"I still remember the first time I saw a night game," Max said with a wide smile. "May 28th, 1946—we got tickets to the first night game ever played at Yankee Stadium. Me and Stephanie, that is. She'd just been in the States for a couple months, having come through Ellis Island in March of that year, and I took the train from Chicago to see her. We got tickets to the game and it was great—her very first baseball game. Yankees lost to the Senators, two to one, but we got to see Joe DiMaggio hit an RBI and—"

Angel shifted his jaw from one side to the other, grinding his molars slightly as he wondered how much more of Brennan's father's annoying prattle he could take. It had been three weeks—even though the old warlock was supposed to have left after two—and Angel was quite sure he would not be able to endure another three. He remembered seeing a vacancy sign at a hotel off Hyperion Avenue in east Hollywood, a few blocks from the corner of Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevard.

"Just watch the fucking game, Max," Angel snapped. "Holy hell."

The warlock furrowed his bushy blond eyebrows and snickered as he shot the vampire a look. "Don't be so snippy, fangboy," he said. "I was just trying to make conversation."

"Well, don't," Angel retorted, unwilling to even acknowledge Max's slur with so much even as a slight rise in his tone of voice.

"Touchy, touchy," Max sang back with a shrug.

Indeed, the Hyperion Hotel was starting to look like a very attractive alternative to being slowly driven insane by L.A.'s most annoying houseguest.

"Fuck off, Max."

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**A/N:**_ Because who doesn't like a little Max? Well, Angel, apparently (LOL)._

_We hope you enjoyed that. But since we're not Avalon, we're not psychic. Let us know what you think. _

_Come on. If this were an ordinary Dharmasera chapter, you'd still be only 1/4 the way through our chapter, so we think you can afford to invest a tiny bit of that extra time into leaving a review. Pretty please? *blinks prettily*_

_Pretty, pretty please?_

_Thanks in advance! We love you guys and appreciate your readership._


	3. Eventually

**A Compendium of Lost Moments**

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**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128  
**Rated: **T  
**Disclaimer: **_We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own._

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**A/N: **_We've given you a peek at Angel & Brennan during the 1920's. And we showed you a glimpse of what Angel was up to in the early 1950's. We've dialed the clock back a little, to the mid-1940's because—well, because the 40's are a really great time period to write about, and because it's a chance to delve into some more of Angel's background. This one is a bit longer than the other two "Compendium" pieces, but we think it's still worth your time. Because tall, dark, brooding vampires are always worth it, right? We certainly think so._

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**Chapter 3: "Eventually"**

**The Bowery, New York City ~ July 23rd, 1946**

Angel picked up his partially crumpled and half-empty pack of cigarettes, plucking one out and rolling it between his fingers before he stuffed it between his lips. Reaching into the right pocket of his dark blue jeans, he pulled out his Zippo lighter and flipped it open, lit the cigarette he held between his teeth, puffing a couple of times before pulling the tip from the flame and snapping his lighter closed.

He set the pack and his lighter back on the bar and reached for the generously-poured double Bushmills the bartender had just slid over to him. Setting his cigarette down on the brim of a nearby crystal glass ashtray, he reached for the glass and raised it to his lips, deliberately hesitating for a moment as he inhaled a whiff of the whiskey's strong, spicy vapors before taking a much-needed sip. He held the liquor in his mouth for a moment, enjoying the burn before swallowing it. Setting his glass down, he reached again for his cigarette and held it between his lips as he opened the copy of the _New York Post _he'd picked up on the way into the bar.

The bar was one that Angel found himself in at least two or three nights a week. He'd found the place by accident a couple of years earlier during the small hours before morning twilight while prowling around the neighborhood—which ran along Third Avenue on the southern part of Manhattan—trying to find some amusement before he would have to wind his way back to the Delancey Street boarding house that he'd been living in after being evicted from his apartment a few weeks before.

At first, he thought it was one of the innumerable dingy bars that lined that part of Third Avenue in the seedy, run-down neighborhood that took its name from _bouwerij_, the Dutch word for 'farm.' The term made Angel laugh when he first heard it because the closest thing to a legitimate farm he knew of was on the other side of Long Island Sound up on the Island itself, or north of the city in Connecticut. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually seen anything green and alive (other than bread mold) growing in Manhattan outside of one of the borough's numerous public parks, the nearest of which was Castle Garden at Battery Park, home of the New York Aquarium.

Angel remembered how he was about to round the corner and head home when he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end in a way he'd only felt in two other specific circumstances: in the presence of other vampires, and when in the company of witches and warlocks, a couple of whom he'd met over the years of his long-term association with Temperance Brennan. He stopped walking and turned around, and, looking past a restaurant that had its menu painted in the window ("pig's feet with boiled cabbage" for ten cents,"oxtail stew" for fifteen cents, "three large pork chops" for thirty cents, all served with coffee, tea or buttermilk), saw a set of stairs leading down to a basement establishment with a hand-carved sign with fading yellow painted letters that read "The Devil's Own."

The sound of breaking glass and snarling behind him shook Angel from his memory as he turned around to see two gray-skinned, yellow-eyed demons grappling and exchanging punches in the corner. The bartender grunted in annoyance and gestured to the bar's security guard—a redhead from Belfast named Maguire, a six-foot tall pillar of solid muscle whose luminescent orange eyes were the only sign that he was anything out of the ordinary—who simply walked over and gruffly picked the two brawlers up by their shirts and hauled them with what looked like almost no effort exerted on his part as he tossed them out the front door.

Glancing back at the folded paper, Angel saw the daily headline in large-block type printed in bold, black letters across the front page of the tabloid-style paper: "Bomb Blows Up British HQ in Palestine" and below it was a photograph of Jerusalem's large, stately-looking King David Hotel, the right half of which had crumpled, surrounded by a swarm of British soldiers standing on the street staring impotently at the wreckage. The smaller headline below said, "91 killed, scores injured in attack by Jewish group."

"Terrible thing, that is," a woman's voice said to him casually, interrupting his much desired and much enjoyed solitude. "You know," the voice continued matter-of-factly, "after the war and all, I'd really hoped we'd seen the last of that sort of thing for a while. There's been far too much dying these last seven or eight years."

With a frown, Angel looked up from his paper and turned to see a blonde, green-eyed woman in her forties sitting on the barstool next to him. Her hair was a very light blonde, quite literally the color of flax, which reminded him of the Claude Debussy piano composition, _"La fille aux cheveux de lin"_ ("the girl with the flaxen hair") that he'd heard performed at a recital in London in 1898, a few months before he left for that fateful trip to Romania that had changed his existence in so many ways, both expected and unexpected. The woman's eyes glittered back at him with a brightness and an intelligence that reminded him of one other pair of eyes he knew even better than his own: Brennan's. It wasn't the color—Brennan's eyes were paler and a bit bluer—but there was something else, something about the way they flickered with a penetrating energy behind their dark-rimmed surface that, after a moment, made him feel simultaneously uneasy and yet intensely curious about this woman.

"Temperance told me you were in town," she said to him, her words falling in loping rhythm from her lips almost as if she'd heard his thoughts. She had an odd accent, not quite English but yet most definitely not American—almost a mix of the two. "Since I had a spare bit of time, I thought I might take the time to finally come and see you."

"Huh?" he blurted out in surprise. For a second, he felt his chest tighten in the same fight-or-flight way it had the night that the government agents had barged into his apartment a couple of years earlier, in 1943, the night he was told he was being pressed into service for the benefit of the war effort. After a moment, the tension melted away a bit but he was left flummoxed by the sudden appearance of this woman who apparently knew quite well the one person who really knew him.

"What?" he asked the woman with a slightly suspicious look on his face. "I don't understand. Who are you, and what do you want with me?"

Even some twenty-odd years after returning to New York (where he'd originally entered the country via Ellis Island around the turn of the century), Angel had kept largely to himself, and even the people who knew him didn't know about his decades-long, long-distance affair with a four-hundred-year-old-plus-witch-turned-anthropolo gist who lived in Chicago when she wasn't traveling the world digging up skeletons or visiting him as she did a few odd times a year. At the current moment, Angel knew, Brennan was enjoying herself in the field again, this time at Tel abu Shahrain near Basra in southern Iraq, excavating the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu where the ruins dated back to 5,400 B.C.

The woman looked at him sitting next to her and couldn't help but stare for a moment at the young man. Though he was dressed very casually, in dark jeans and a somewhat rumpled cornflower-blue button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled up, his shoes—Weejun loafers—were shined and well-made, and he wore a Swiss-made Roamer watch on his left wrist. His hair was neatly trimmed to a fine buzz on the back, along the sides and over his ears, but was longer on top, combed and slicked back with a shiny pomade as was the fashion.

"You don't know who I am," the mysterious blonde said with a soft smile. "But _I _know who _you_ are...Angel."

Clearing his throat, Angel took a long drag on his cigarette and stared at the woman, saying nothing as he reached once more for his whiskey. After a minute, he inclined his head and then opened his mouth to speak. "Yeah," he said simply as he took a sip of the Bushmills sixteen-year single malt, letting the spicy liquor pool on his tongue for a moment as he tried to read the puzzling expression in the woman's twinkling green eyes. "I kinda got that."

She laughed quietly at his gruff, almost monosyllabic responses, remembering a letter she'd received eight years earlier from her friend's daughter, postmarked in Lhasa, in which Brennan had wrote of her erstwhile companion and how much she'd missed his company. Brennan had told her how the ensouled vampire was prone to falling into extended spells of dark brooding. As she sat next to him at the bar, she could feel his depressed mood hanging in the air around him like a pall, and knew that once again, Brennan had been quite right.

He was, no doubt, an attractive and intriguing figure, she instantly knew, despite his glum mood. She smiled as she recalled how Brennan had described him to her with a crooked smile on her lips and a fondness in her husky voice as she spoke of him. As she looked at him, with his high cheekbones, olive skin, slender lips, strong, pockmarked jaw, and thick, muscular neck and shoulders, she could see the source of the attraction. Above all, she found her attention drawn to the smoldering expression in his dark brown eyes, which she remembered Brennan describing once as deep, watery wells that reflected back the full gamut of the man's feelings. A sadness dwelled in those brown eyes, presumably a touch glassier and more dull from the whiskey he'd been drinking, but something else welled in those eyes—a hope that persisted despite the heavy cloak of brooding that clung to him as he sat there, smoking and drinking in a bar full of demons, vampires and supernatural humans such as herself.

"My name's Stephanie," she said to him, touching his forearm with her hand. His skin was cool to the touch, and she felt the sinews shift slightly under his skin as he reacted to the contact but didn't move his arm away.

"Yeah," he grunted. He held his cigarette firmly between his forefingers as he felt a sudden swirling sensation in his gut that warned him he was not as in control of the situation that was unfolding before him. He looked up as leveled a hard glare at the disconcertingly forward woman next to him. "And who are you again, exactly?" he questioned her sharply. His brow then furrowed in annoyance as another thought occurred to him and ruffled his feathers. "Don't tell me—she sent you here to check on me or something? Make sure I'm being a good boy and not staying out past my curfew or whatever?"

Slowly shaking her head, the woman tried to mollify him. "No," she answered his question. "Not at all."

"Then what?" Angel pressed, trying to understand the woman and becoming increasingly frustrated the longer he was unable to do so. "Why would she even tell you about me? It's not like Bren has ever been much for being the bestest buddies type. Who are you anyway?"

Tilting her head, she answered, "Let's just say that Temperance and I go...way back." Seeing the skeptical narrowing of the vampire's eyes, she added, "I've known her since the day was born." After a second or two, she moved her hand and sat back on her bar stool, reaching into her pocketbook and pulling out a green lacquer cigarette case. Flipping it open, she pulled out one of them and placed it between her lips, then looked over to Angel with a smile.

He blinked a couple of times and imagined this woman standing in front of a cooking fire next to a pale-eyed, auburn-haired toddler in a woolen dress. A part of him always regretted that Brennan had been born before the advent of photography, because he'd always wanted to see how beautiful and adorable she'd looked as a little girl. The thought that this woman Stephanie knew her then, before she knew the pain that hardened her after her mother's passing, somehow thawed his reticence.

Sensing an opening, she turned to him and asked, "Could I trouble you for a light? Especially since. somewhat coincidentally if I believed in that sort of thing, we smoke the same brand and all."

Angel sighed, then grabbed his lighter from on top of his own pack of cigarettes. Flipping it open, he smiled faintly as Stephanie leaned forward and caught the tip of her cigarette in the flame, sucked a few quick puffs and sat back in her seat as he closed the Zippo with a sharp snap. He cocked his head to the side and watched her, his chocolate brown eyes a bit brighter after Stephanie's mention of his longtime lover, but he still didn't say anything.

"Did you start smoking these in the war?" she asked him, gesturing with her chin towards the crumpled red and white Lucky Strike packaging sitting next to his whiskey glass on the bar.

"No," he replied. He took a long drag of his own, sighed and said, "I mean, not this war."

"I didn't think the Tommies had Lucky Strikes in the trenches," she said with a knowing grin.

"Not usually," Angel answered, pursing his lips as he realized that, indeed, this interesting woman knew far more about him than he had ever told anyone—anyone, that is, other than Brennan herself.

"Not as standard-issue, that is," he explained with a grin. "We usually rolled our own. But there was a guy in my unit, the 252nd Tunneling Company, who did a bit of trading with another one of the tunneling companies a bit farther down the line, a Canadian unit, and he got American cigarettes from them in exchange for..." His eyes swiveled up to the ceiling for a moment before he blinked away the memory. "Anyway, I first smoked 'em then. But I didn't really start until..." His voice trailed off as he remembered the young ensign, Lawson, who he'd turned in the engine room of the captured German sub three years earlier. He shook his head as if he could shake away the memory, frowned and said simply, "It wasn't 'til a couple of years back I started...you know..." After a moment, he added, "Bren really hates it, though."

Stephanie smiled at hearing him call Brennan by her nickname—the one only he had ever used for her—then leaned forward in her seat, closing the distance between them as she asked quietly, "Do you miss her?"

Angel took one last drag on his cigarette and snuffed it out in the ashtray. He reached for his whiskey but didn't pick up the glass, but instead just rotated it back and forth on the bar in a lazy arc. "Every day," he said. "Every single damn day."

"She misses you more than you possibly know," she said as she acknowledged the bartender with a quick nod and pointed towards Angel's whiskey with a two-fingered gesture. "Probably more than she'd ever say, or ever admit to you directly. But, she tells me things she wouldn't necessarily tell other people. She says so in her letters. She's very much like her father in that way—"

Angel winced at the mention of Brennan's father. "Max doesn't like me much," he grumbled, glaring into his whiskey as he remembered the first time he encountered the old warlock in the lobby of a London hotel and how he was met with the same withering look when he ran into him again coming in one night from the movies while he was living with Brennan in Chicago. "Never has, really."

A smile tugging at the edge of her lips, Stephanie asked, "Oh?"

Nodding, Angel said, "Yeah."

Stephanie was quiet for a moment and then asked, "And, why do you think that?"

Angel chewed the bottom of his lip for a minute before he answered vaguely. "Let's just say I always got a little nervous watching him add logs to the fireplace," he said. "'Cause I always figured he was always on the lookout for a splinter big enough to do me in with."

Laughing, lightly at that, Stephanie chuckled. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about him too much if I was you," she said with a knowing smile and a wave of her hand. "He's full of bluster but fairly harmless. His bark is almost always worse than his bite...most of the time anyway." Angel shifted in his seat and muttered something inaudible under his breath. "He loves his daughter, though, and Tempe's kind of the exception to a lot of rules...not just for him as I'm sure you know yourself," she added. "He's being a normal dad...looking out for his little girl, you know. She's the only thing he's got—the only family he has in this world."

Angel shrugged, still unconvinced. A heavy silence hung over the pair before Angel muttered, "I know he doesn't like me. He never has, and I don't think he ever will."

Tilting her head at him, Stephanie asked, "Oh? How come?"

"Because," Angel sighed. "When I was back in Chicago, you know, living with her..." His voice warmed at the reference to that five-year span as a wistful sigh punctuated his words. "Well, for starters, the looks he'd give me would peel the paint off walls."

Stephanie chuckled, having seen her old friend and erstwhile lover give such stares with those steely blue eyes of his. "He was testing you," she explained with a slight shrug of her shoulder. "And, just so you know, you passed the test."

Angel's eyebrow arched, and he snorted in disbelief, "Really?"

"Absolutely," she said. "He told me so, when he was here in New York just a couple of months ago." Stephanie flashed her carefully-waxed eyebrow. "Like Temperance, her father wears his manner like an armor, but underneath, he's as loving and tender as she is. While he didn't care for you at first—I can't lie to you about that because, in fact, saying that he didn't care for you is probably a gross understatement, because he really hated your guts—but, he knows that you make her happy, and in the end, his daughter's happiness is all he really wants. He's not going to gush about it, but he's accepted that you bring Temperance that happiness that he's always wanted for her."

Considering her words, Angel nodded and stroked his finger on the smooth surface of the bar. Several long moments of silence hung between them before he looked up again and spoke.

"Yeah, well, Bren...I know she's in Iraq now," he said absently, steering the conversation back to a subject he felt more comfortable talking about. "Digging up some ancient city—one that's supposedly old enough to go back to the time of Noah and the big flood." Having finished his first cigarette, he reached for another one and lit it up, adding in between puffs, "But Bren doesn't believe in all of that Biblical stuff. She says it's just superstitious legend made for ignorant, weak-minded people to believe in because they're not willing to put the effort into thinking scientifically about...I dunno, something or other."

Stephanie laughed. "Temperance is a woman of strong opinions," she said. "You love that about her, don't you?"

Angel ran his hand through his hair, slicked back with a generous dab of Brylcreem, nodded and gave her a slight, fleeting smile. "Yeah. She's constantly blowing my mind with her facts and theories." He stared for a moment at the finger of whiskey in his glass. "Sometimes I think I'm way outta my league with her, you know?" He stopped and then for the first time, smiled a legitimate smile as he tilted his head and confessed to the other woman with a light chuckle, "Actually, I think that most of the time."

"Hmmm," she murmured thoughtfully. "Granted, I don't know you well, but I wouldn't sell yourself too short. I don't know, but I have a hunch that you bring your own gifts to the table, Angel."

Angel gave her another appraising look. It was clear to him that she knew Brennan very well, and had since she was a girl, and that she kept in continued contact with her. Although he wasn't sure, she seemed also to have an intimate relationship of some kind with Brennan's father, though exactly what kind, he couldn't be certain. But, above all and most importantly, she seemed quite honest, refreshingly open, and very friendly. The quiet murmur inside of Angel, the one that had resided in his mind for twenty-three years since the night his lover found him and took him in, became to hum louder inside of him. He felt a warmth in his chest and the thrumming of Brennan's soul inside of him led him to think that, despite his natural inclination to the contrary—especially when it came to witches and other users of magic—he could trust this woman.

"I can cook," he said with a snicker, then added a bit more edgily, "even though I don't eat—how's that for irony?"

"I think you have other gifts," Stephanie said, her last word fractured by a laugh. "And I don't mean..." Her eyes met Angel's and she watched a genuine smile crack his stubbornly serious face.

"Well," he chuckled with a waggle of his eyebrows. "I don't want to brag, but..."

Stephanie laughed again, squeezing her eyes shut as she threw her hands up in mock embarrassment. "Please, no," she said. "No need to give me any details." Her cheeks flushed a little as she remembered Max telling her how he came out of the bathroom the first night he met Angel at Brennan's apartment and how he'd found them kissing, the vampire having pinned her against the living room wall with his hip flush against hers as she palmed his backside with her hands. "Tempe and Matthew have told me all I need to know...and then some, truth to be told, since I think you're starting to get that I'm all about honesty."

She acknowledged the bartender who brought two glasses of the same single-malt Bushmills that Angel had been drinking and placed a fifty-cent piece on the bar to cover the latest round and the one he'd been drinking before. The bartender, a corpulent man with a faint blue sheen to his waxy skin who must have stood six foot five as he towered over the bar, swiped his giant hand across the bar and collected her money. As he walked away, she turned to Angel with an amused look.

"Besides," she said, "Temperance is very...discriminating...in the relationships she keeps. I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have kept you around as long as she has if there wasn't something fairly compelling about you that held her interest."

Angel swallowed and shrugged. "I guess..."

Stephanie tilted her head to one side and rolled her eyes. "She's entrusted herself to you," she said, the gentle cadence of her speech rounding the edge off the gravity of her statement. "She gave herself to you, Angel, in more ways than one, not the least important of which was giving her very soul into your keeping. She would've sooner taken her chances with losing that soul to the powers of darkness if she had any doubt that you were worthy of her trust."

His mouth fell open at her words. _She knows, _he thought. _She knows about us...about our arrangement...our agreement._

In that moment, most of the tension he'd been holding in his chest and shoulders seemed to relax away. "I'm afraid sometimes," he confessed, his low voice nearly a whisper. "I'm afraid I'm not strong enough to be what she needs me to be." He sighed and added, "I know it sounds stupid, but—"

"You're strong enough," she assured him confidently. "You know that Temperance doesn't abide weakness, and she doesn't trust easily. That she trusted you with her soul is irrefutable proof of the strength she sees in you." She paused for a moment, smiling faintly as she watched his face, then said, "Trust her trust in you, Angel."

He scratched the back of his head and nodded. "Okay."

"Your two lives are intertwined, woven and bound into a single destiny. I can feel it in my heart," she said. She rolled her lips together in a firm line, then said, "Why don't you let me read your cards?"

"What?" he coughed with a grimace. "Cards?"

"Yes," Stephanie said as she reached into her handbag. "Tarot cards. You've heard of them, I'm sure?"

Angel shook his head repeatedly. "Wait, oh no," he said, his low voice cracking as he held up his hand. "Please don't tell me you're some kind of Gypsy fortuneteller or anything like that. I don't like Gypsies, okay? I mean, I _really _don't like Gypsies." He continued to shake his head emphatically as he added, "Nuh-uh, no siree, alright?"

She placed her hand on his shoulder, frowning a little as he flinched at her touch. "Angel," she said, her voice smooth and steady as she tried to comfort him. "Listen, relax. I'm not a Gypsy, and tarot is not inherently Gypsy magic. This has nothing to do with Romanii magics in any way, I swear. Most historians and practitioners believe tarot emerged in Italy, actually, not Romania."

She patted his shoulder reassuringly and then reached back into her handbag. She felt his gaze follow her every move as she set the box of cards on the bar and opened the lid.

"No, wait—what are you doing?" His brow furrowed deeply as he watched her pull the cards from the box and spread them in a fanlike arc across the dark, varnished walnut of the bar.

"Pick four cards," she said, tapping her index finger on the bar. "Come on, Angel. Go ahead. They won't bite."

He looked at the cards, then up at her, and then back down to the cards for a moment. Mysticism had always bothered him, perhaps even more so than magic, even though his own run-ins with magic over the years, at least before the Halloween night almost twenty-three years earlier Brennan found him—starving, freezing and despondent—on the streets of Chicago, were usually less than positive. But something about this woman made him want to trust her. For a moment, he looked at her, hesitant for reasons he did not completely understand, but as he felt the anxiety flutter in his belly, he sighed and reached for another cigarette, his crutch of choice, and lit it in a sequence of movements so swift and smooth, it left no doubt in his companion's mind that he'd been chain-smoking for quite some time.

"Alright," he muttered, draining the last of his first glass of whiskey before sliding it across the bar and surveying the arch of cards spread before him. "Four?" he asked. Stephanie nodded. He placed his finger on a card and slid it out of the spread, but didn't turn it over. He glanced up at the flaxen-haired witch and grinned sheepishly, then picked another three cards and likewise pulled them out of the array, but left them face down.

"The first card represents something in your past," she said. "People like you and I—we have very long pasts, so it's not that the card will necessarily represent your _entire _past, but rather, something that's happened in your past that informs your future. Does that make sense?"

"Umm, yeah," he said. "So, not what happened back in the old country, mmm? Maybe just what happened these last few years?" He closed his eyes and shook his head as he tried to suppress all of the memories of what he had done to earn him the name Angelus, the Scourge of Europe, pushing them as far back in his mind as he could. Looking back up at her, Angel asked, "Will that do?"

Nodding slowly, Stephanie said, "Yes. I think that will do."

Angel took a long, hard draw on his cigarette and stared for a second at the faintly glowing orange tip, holding the smoke in his mouth and throat before letting it stream in languid tendrils from his nostrils. He always liked watching the smoke pour from his nose. It almost made him feel human...feel _normal_. For a moment, he wondered if that's why he really took to smoking in the first place—just to feel normal. He was shaken from his thoughts by a question.

"Are you ready?" she asked him with an arched eyebrow as she stroked her finger over the glossy back of the first card.

Angel shrugged. "Sure," he said, holding his glass in front of his mouth as he watched her slowly turn over the first card. The card, 'The Hanged Man,' depicted a man hanging upside down from a T-shaped cross or gallows by one foot, with the other foot tucked behind his knee and his hands crossed behind his back. "Uhh, that doesn't look good," he groaned.

_I knew this was a mistake, _he thought. _You'd think I'd learn by now...me and witches. Never a good thing. Well, except for Bren._

"Ohhh," she crooned, the syllable ringing nasally as she watched Angel react to the card, as most querants did, negatively.

"What's that mean?" he said, his voice wavering a bit.

"Oh, it's not necessarily a bad thing, despite the image on the card," Stephanie said with a comforting smile, reaching over and placing her hand on his forearm, giving him a light squeeze. "The Hanged Man represents the idea of surrendering the past and stepping forward into the unknown. You see, the Hanged Man willingly allows himself to be suspended and dangle head-first. It's about letting go of the things that hold you back and taking chances so you can realize a previously unimaginable future."

Angel thought about her words for a moment.

"I let go of her," he said quietly, flicking his ash into the tray as he stared at the wall on the far side of the bar. "I mean, not that she was holding _me _back. It was the other way around. I was holding _her_ back. I let her go so that she could have the future she deserved." He stroked his thumb over the side of the cigarette mindlessly before bringing it to this mouth again, pulling a stiff drag on it and quickly snorting out the smoke before he turned back to the old witch. "I know she didn't want to go," he said. "She thought she wanted that life we had in Chicago, which I admit was wonderful—the best years of my life, really—but if I had stayed there, with her, just because that's what I wanted, it wouldn't have been the right thing. I had to be the one to go, to force her hand, I guess. It was the right thing to do for _her_..." He leaned his head back and sighed. "Right?" he asked. "I mean, I did the right thing, didn't I? Hardest thing I ever did, but..." He looked at her, his warm brown eyes pleading as they glistened in the dim light of the bar. "Please tell me I did the right thing."

Stephanie took a deep breath and tilted her head to the side as she watched his face.

"You love her," she said, her eyes surveying the hard, tense lines of his face. "You love her so much you were willing to give her up," she added, her words a statement of fact and not a question.

"Yes," he whispered. "It killed me to do it. And it kills me a little every time I watch her leave, you know, when she comes to see me, but...for now, I guess, it's the right thing."

Several long moments of silence hung between them before Stephanie patted him on the arm and asked, "Are you ready for the next one?"

"I don't know," he said grimly, then seeing the flicker of disappointment in her eyes, forced a smile and nodded. "Okay."

"This one represents your present," she said as she turned the card over to reveal a black-cloaked figure against a gray background surrounded by five gold cups, three of which were overturned, spilling their contents on the ground. Two upright cups stood on the ground behind him. The figure's face was obscured but his head seemed to hang dejectedly from his hunched shoulders.

"The Five of Cups—what's that mean?" Angel asked, nibbling the inside of his lip, his troubled brow quivering as it knit over his deep-set eyes. The image on the card looked grave to him and he felt a nervous clenching in his belly as he stared at the card.

"You've done something you regret," she said, her eyes narrowing as she gazed deep into his. "Something you feel bad having done. It weighs heavy on your heart." She pursed her lips as she saw him wince at the reference to his heart, which lay cold and unbeating in his chest. "You know what I mean," she added quietly.

Angel's jaw quickly hardened and a low growl sounded from the back of his throat as he reached for his fresh whiskey. He brought the glass to his mouth and drained half of it in a single swallow.

"I _have _done more things that I regret than you can possibly imagine," he said through gritted teeth. His voice dropped to a lower, darker pitch as he set his glass down with an audible _clank, _and he said, "I am the worst mass murderer in history." He blinked a couple of times as he shifted his jaw from one side to the other. "Even the bastards they they've got on trial at Nuremberg now—granted, they turned their country into a machine that killed millions, but..." He sighed. "None of them took as many lives by their own hands as I have." His eyes fell to a headline on the bottom front page of the _New York Post _which still sat on on the bar in front of him. Attorneys for the defendants at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg were still making their closing statements, one by one, as they had since the 4th of July. "My hands are covered with blood that nothing, _nothing_ will ever wash away."

Stephanie snuffed out her cigarette and turned to him. "I know," she said. "But that's not what's eating at you, is it? You've carried that burden for almost fifty years, since the night you got your soul back. Something else is weighing on you, Angel. Something that's happened far more recently."

He threaded his hand through his hair and grabbed a fistful towards the back of his scalp, shaking his head as he took one last hard suck on his Lucky Strike before crushing the butt in the ashtray. He remembered the night he came to Brennan's home in Chicago, straight from Union Station, and how he'd broken down and confessed to her what he had done on that German submarine. Ravaged by guilt over having condemned another man to an eternity of misery—doomed to spend the rest of his potentially endless existence trolling the earth, quenching his anger and slaking his thirst with the blood of the living—he'd come to her broken, and she made him whole again by offering herself to him in a way she never had before. Feeding on her that night helped him put what he'd done in perspective, but as he rode the train back east to New York a few weeks later, he wondered if he had finally done what he left Chicago fifteen years earlier to prevent—becoming a burden on her, unable to manage on his own the gravity of his own anguish—and in so doing, put not only her physical body and very life at risk in feeding on her, encumbering her mind and thoughts with worries that would prevent her from being able to fulfill her own destiny. It was that, even more than the guilt over what he had actually done to Lawson, that troubled his thoughts each night and fractured his sleep with worry each day.

"You don't have to tell me," Stephanie said quietly. "I know, Angel. Feels like you're drowning in guilt, doesn't it?"

Angel grunted and reached for his glass. "Is that what the cards say?"

"I can see it in your eyes," she said, her voice low and even. "The cards merely point to a struggle. That struggle is written all over your face, Angel." He closed his eyes and frowned. "Listen, Angel—the Five of Cups says that the only way to stop drowning in the anguish of the loss of the spilled cups is to have the strength to look away from what is lost..." She pointed to the spilled cups on the card. "And to focus on what is left. There can be no redemption if you're too lost in woe to look for it. Focus on what you still have, not on what you've lost. In every loss, in every sacrifice, there is something gained. You simply have to open your eyes to the truth of what was gained, and set aside thoughts of what was lost or taken away."

"Accentuate the positive?" he grumbled. "Chin up and all that?"

"More or less, yes," she said with a gentle shrug. She reached for his hand, curling her fingers around his wide palm. "You're a good man, Angel," she said. "The soul you have inside of you is good. The choices you've made you made with the best of intentions. Sometimes we can't save everyone."

He turned and looked away.

Stephanie took a small sip of her whiskey, wincing a little as the vapors hit her nose as she swallowed, then set her glass down. "The next card signifies your future or the path forward," she said as she turned over the third card he'd picked.

"Hmmm," she murmured as she revealed the image of a winged, haloed figure of uncertain gender standing with one foot in stream and one on the bank while holding two goblets and pouring the contents of one into the other.

Angel turned and looked at the card. "Temperance?" he said incredulously. "You're kidding, right?" He scratched his jaw and realized he hadn't shaved before he went out that night. "I know that Bren's...I mean, she's...what we have between us is..." He struggled for words. "I know she's my future," he said. "And I'm hers."

"I know," she said with a grin. "But there's more," she continued with a tap of her index finger on the card. When he still had a confused look on his face, Stephanie said with a slight nod, "Let me explain. I know the coincidence of the card's name alone may seem hard to look past, but there's a deeper meaning."

Angel licked his lips self-consciously, then lit another cigarette before nodding for her to continue.

"Temperance is about balance," Stephanie said. "Blending opposites, synthesizing two discrete entities into a single whole. Back in the days before science, when I was a girl, they called it 'alchemy.' Look at the card..." She pointed to the image again. "Diluting wine. Not throwing it out, but rather putting water and wine together into a mixture that's fortifying but not too intoxicating. You don't have to give something up completely, but rather, find a balance, a state of equilibrium where the two disparate substances can work together. But like alchemy, it's not an instant fix, right? Trial and error. It's incremental. You might make mistakes along the way, but if you keep trying, seeking that balance, you'll get there. You'll find that point of equilibrium. You just have to be patient."

Angel sat there in silence for a minute, smoking and sipping his whiskey, occasionally glancing over to his companion. She watched him with interest, but spoke not a murmur as she gathered up all of the cards, except for the last one, and straightened out the deck.

"You think we can do it?" he asked her vaguely, his mouth hanging open as his hand toyed with his lighter. "Bren and I? I mean, to make a life, her and I, together?" He raised his eyebrows expectantly, his soft brown eyes glimmering in the light of the lamp that hung over the corner of the bar where the two sat. His forehead creased and uncreased as his eyes awaited her answer. "Do you?"

Reaching once more for his hand, Stephanie clasped it and stroked her thumb over the web of veins on the top, squeezing it gently in hers in a gesture that was intimate and comforting.

"I know you will," she said. "I don't know when, or how, but I know in my heart that you will...eventually."

A smile curved the edges of Angel's lips as he reached over and patted her hand, sandwiching her hand between his. "You're a woman of wisdom," he said, noting how his hands dwarfed hers. "If you think we can—well, then I guess we can."

Stephanie nodded and smiled fondly, then winked as she placed her fingers on the fourth card. "The last card is like a summary or an overview of the entire reading. It speaks to the overall message of the spread—the cards we've seen tonight." She noted an optimistic curiosity in his warm brown eyes as he watched her finger tap on the card. "Ready?"

He met her eyes with a sheepish grin and nodded.

She pursed her lips and slowly turned over the last card. The card diplayed a lone man, an elderly figure with a gnarled wooden staff in one hand and a lantern in the other, clad in a gray cloak, his bearded face mostly concealed behind a hood, and below his feet read "The Hermit." Angel's round, muscular shoulders slumped and he pouted, looking up at her with a crestfallen expression in his eyes.

"What's it with all the gloomy cards?" he asked petulantly.

Stephanie shook her head. "Just as you can't judge a book by its cover," she said. "You can't judge a card solely by the pretty picture painted on its front, hmmm?"

Angel stared at her for a moment, and then looked back at the card, and then hesitated before he arched an eyebrow back at Stephanie. "So, is this a...good card?" he asked hopefully, his eyebrows raised and his broad forehead deeply creased as he waited for her answer. "Or at least not too bad?"

Stephanie gave him a soft smile and then a shrug. "The cards themselves aren't good or bad, Angel," she said. "They just...are. And, in this case, the Hermit is about introspection and self-reflection...about taking a step back from the hustle and bustle, you know...taking time to be alone and take stock of things so you can move forward with a clear understanding of how all the pieces fit together."

Furrowing his brow, Angel looked down at his hand as he fumbled with his lighter.

"I've been trying to make sense of it all for a long time now," he said. "In part, that's why I came to New York. I was hoping I'd find the answers here."

Stephanie leaned back in her seat, uncrossing and recrossing her legs as she cocked her head and gave him a narrow-eyed look.

"The answers are all there—inside of _you_," she said vaguely. "And...inside of _her_."

His brows knit low over his eyes as he grunted softly in acknowledgment. "Is she a hermit, too?" he asked her, somewhat surprised at his own question.

Stephanie smiled, reaching up to tuck a loose strand of her blond hair behind her ear. "You're not the only one wandering the world, looking for answers," she said. "And, while I can't tell you what the answers are, I'm pretty sure that the farther you two wander, the clearer those answers will become. And when you're both done wandering, you'll find out how to achieve that wholeness that you're each looking for."

"Eventually," he said, his Adam's apple dipping low in his throat as he swallowed hard. "Right?"

She didn't answer him, but merely shrugged with a demure flutter of her long eyelashes. Angel brought his cigarette back to his lips and drew a deep puff, then leaned his head back and blew the smoke out in two hard, straight streams, watching it dissipate in the air over the bar.

He thought of Brennan and when they'd last been together, four months earlier when she'd passed through New York en route to Iraq, and how he'd had lain in bed after they'd made love for the last time that night, watching her as she slept, her auburn hair fanned over the pillow as she dozed. The image, and the memory of how soft her skin had felt beneath his fingertips as he'd stroked her upper arm, enjoying the murmurs she made in her sleep at feeling his touch, made him smile in anticipation of seeing her again in a few months to celebrate the Samhain holiday at the end of October.

_Eventually, _he told himself. _We'll find a way somehow to make a life big enough for both of us—a single life shared._

After a moment, his expression grew serious once more, eyes narrowing again as they flickered back to meet her green ones.

"Why did you seek me out this night?" he asked, his smile returning to his face as soon as the words left his lips.

She cocked her head to the side and gave Angel an appraising look, then shrugged. "Because I love her, too."

* * *

**A/N2: **_So there you are. With the way "Eventually" started out, we bet you thought this little ditty was gonna be a gloomy one, huh? Bet we had you going for a minute there, didn't we? We're so sneaky... *snicker*_

_So, anyone recognize Stephanie? She's definitely an interesting figure, and she'll be back. We mentioned her in Max's oneshot, but wanted to give you a closer look._

_Did you like the little bits of historical texture we threw in there for you? July 1946 was a pretty eventful time, with the world picking up the pieces after World War II. For those keeping score at home, you'll note that this chapter took place in a part of New York City—the Lower East Side—which was a pretty interesting place to be back then. A young writer named Jack Kerouac and a few of his friends, attracted by the low rents in that part of Manhattan, started hanging out there after the war. Those other dingy bars on Third Avenue were full of disaffected young men who would later be called Beatniks. How 'bout that? Angel wasn't the only brooding young man slumming in the Bowery in the summer of 1946. In fact, we imagine he fit in pretty well there... :-)_

_We're still trying to get that next "Echoes" chapter ready for you. It's proving to be more complex to edit and longer than we expected—not that that's any surprise with us, but we extend our apologies nonetheless. The good news is final edits are proceeding, and although we know we've said it before, we are close to finishing. In the meantime, we have a couple more of these random oneshots in the hopper. One is set during the weeks that Angel spent with Brennan in Mérida, Mexico in 1929. The other—well, we'll keep that one a surprise, but it may include a glimpse at Brennan's relationships with some of the other women who knew Angelus in the years before his ensoulment in 1898._

_As for this one, let us know what you think. Please leave us a review. Pretty please? :-)_

_Thanks in advance! We love you guys and, as always, appreciate your readership more than you will ever know._


	4. Mérida

**A Compendium of Lost Moments**

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**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128  
**Rated: **T  
**Disclaimer: **_We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own._

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**A/N: **_Ever since we first mentioned Mérida in the story "The After Party," the image of Angel and Brennan's brief sojourn together in that picturesque city in southern Mexico has been evocative for us as writers and, we think, for a lot of you as readers. The episode has been mentioned a few more times in the series since then and we thought it was time to flesh out what that period was like for our couple. So, without further ado, here goes..._

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**Chapter 4: Mérida**

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**Mérida, Mexico ~ May 6, 1929**

Angel stood in front of the sink and looked half-attentively into the mirror as he drew the straight-edge razor over his jaw in short, precise strokes, dipping the blade into the sink basin to rinse the tiny specks of crisp dark hair off of the edge before he brought it back up to his face and resumed shaving. He held his rounded chin high and pulled the pockmarked skin of his neck taut as he stroked the razor under his square jaw, taking care to avoid the prominent bulge of his Adam's apple.

The radio crooned softly from its place on a rickety bookcase in the sitting room that Brennan had picked up in a second-hand shop to hold ancient looking leather bound tomes on the Mayans and Spanish conquest of Mexico. Works such as Bernal Diaz del Castillo's _The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, _Edward King's _Antiquities of Mexico, _and a copy of Ernst Förstemann's 1892 photochromolithographic of _the Dresden Codex_, a work dating to the Mayan culture of Chichén Itzá in the late eleventh century—a work that was also, coincidentally, the oldest known book from the Americas to have survived to the modern day—littered the shelves of the small bookcase crafted from _pucté, _a hardwood indigenous to that part of the Yucatán.

The sounds coming from the radio had a tinny edge to them which normally wasn't too noticeable when Brennan kept it tuned to one of the two stations that they could pick up in Mérida. The one that she preferred—a channel that played very little music, instead filling most of its limited number of broadcast hours with news commentaries, farm reports, and weather forecasts—tended to drive Angel crazy when he spent hours at home listening to it while she was gone during the day. So, instead, whenever he could, he flipped it to the other station that played half-hour sponsored music broadcasts. On this particular morning, the wistful voice of the soprano Dusolina Giannini crackled over the airwaves as she sang the song _'Cielito Lindo.'_ Angel whistled along to the tune between his teeth as he shaved, stroking his thumb along the underside of his jaw to make sure he got everything. It had been 176 years since he'd been able to see his own face in a mirror while shaving, and in that time, shaving by feel alone had become second nature to him.

Angel paused for a moment, resting his hand on the edge of the sink as he thought of the years he spent in London. He remembered how, for a month during the winter of 1872, he'd tried growing a moustache, sideburns, and a goatee, but after a fortnight of relentless teasing about how 'ridiculous' he looked, and a significant amount of not-so-subtle complaints from Brennan about him chafing her delicate skin, he'd given up and shaved it all off. Even after that, he used to shave only every other or sometimes every third day. But after the first night he'd spent with her in Chicago—the night she took him in, fed him, gave him a bath, a haircut, and a deliciously sensual straight-razor shave—and knowing how much she liked the feel of his smooth, freshly-shaven cheek against her skin, he'd made it a point to shave each evening before she came home from her errands. He knew she'd see his clean shave, smell his aftershave lotion, take his perfectly smooth face between her hands, and kiss him, moaning passionately into his mouth. It was then that Angel decided that, as much as he disliked shaving, if it got her to kiss him like that, he'd shave twice a day if he had to.

The song ended and the radio moved to the next tune, a waltz that Angel recognized as _'Dios Nunca Muere' _('God Never Dies'). The particular radio station in Mérida that played the music he liked was very small and had a correspondingly small collection of recordings that cycled through in an endless repetition. After hearing the same songs over and over again, he'd begun to memorize the melodies and, though he didn't always understand all of the words, the lyrics themselves:

_Sé que una nueva luz  
__Habrá de alcanzar nuestra soledad  
__Y que todo aquel que llega a morir  
__Empieza a vivir una eternidad..._

_(I know that a new light  
__Will reach our loneliness  
__And all those who happen to die  
__Begin to live forever...)_

As he continued humming to himself, Angel pulled the stopper out of the sink and watched the foamy water swirl down the slightly grimy faded white porcelain basin before he opened the spout and rinsed the last bits of hair down the drain. After a minute, he started to legitimately sing along with the music with a sloppy grin on his face, knowing his low tenor was grossly out of key but not caring.

He reached for the dark green glass bottle of sandalwood-infused skin tonic that Brennan had bought for him as a going away present before he'd left Chicago for New York six months earlier. He'd used it sparingly in her absence, only wearing it when he felt particularly homesick for her absence or when he was actually with her. He dribbled a couple of drops in his chafed palm, rubbing his hands together before massaging it into the skin on each side of his smooth, freshly-shaven face. His hands had developed calluses on them as a consequence of his newest recreational pastime: ice hockey. Although the spring thaw had melted the ice from the ponds where he and his demon friends would play by lantern-light, the calluses remained. Brennan had given him an emollient lotion of beeswax and avocado oil to soften his skin, but he'd stubbornly refused to use it—his resistance encouraged in no small part by the way she sighed and moaned when he'd take her deliciously round and heavy breasts in his callused palms and would tweak her tender flesh between his rough thumb and forefinger.

He washed his hands and dried them on the towel next to the sink, then walked towards the armoire, opening the door and staring at its contents dumbly for several moments as he realized he'd forgotten to finish their laundry that day. He frowned, not at the notion that seeing to the laundry had fallen to him—for the past five years, he'd been the one to hand over their dirty clothes and take delivery of the clean, pressed ones from the twice-weekly laundry service Brennan used there—but that he'd forgotten and would have more of it to do tomorrow. He'd punched a fellow's front teeth out in Chicago for calling him "Mr. Angel Brennan, house-husband"—though the scaly-skinned Delba demon had had it coming to him anyway, as far as Angel was concerned—but the fact of the matter was, he didn't mind helping her keep house if it meant he could wake up with her in his arms every day.

He was standing there in front of the armoire wearing only a towel around his waist when she walked in.

"Angel?" she called out to him from the entryway, setting her totes of _mercado _purchases on the floor in front of the icebox before walking into the bedroom.

A wide smile broke across his face the moment he saw her. Brennan was utterly breathtaking in a knee-length white cotton sundress that she'd purchased in the local market, hand-embroidered with a floral pattern in ivory thread around its simple scoop neckline, and it was so airy and flowy she seemed float into the room. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with a sprig of fresh cream colored tea roses tucked under the hat band, and on her wrist wore the bangle of hammered silver Angel had bought for her the night before from an artisan at the Cinco de Mayo _fiesta_ in the plaza in front of the Catedral de San Ildefonso.

In the months since he'd left Chicago, he had missed her terribly—so much so that he felt a tangible ache in his chest each time he thought about her, which was more or less all the time. He knew he would have to leave her again, and that Mérida represented a temporary respite from their difficult but necessary separation, but after a flash of dread washed over him, he pushed away the thought that he would have to leave her again.

Angel greedily drank in the sight of her, standing still and silent for a long moment, selfishly enjoying the sensations the sight of her evoked in him, before he finally approached her.

"Hey there," he said, his voice low and velvety as he reached up and carefully removed her sun hat, gently tossing it on the small dresser against the wall of what had become their impromptu bedroom as he felt her slender fingers skim along the edge of the towel that he'd secured low and snug around his hips. "Mmmm," he murmured. He felt his body awaken with the want of her that never really left him, subsiding like the ebb and flow of the daily tide, as a warm feeling tingled low in his belly and coursed through his limbs at feeling her touch. "I missed you," he mumbled as he leaned in and kissed her lips softly. He curled his fingers around her hip as he pulled her in for another, deeper kiss, and for a moment, they each were lost in the dizzying taste and feel of the other's mouth as their bodies crackled with want. "Very much," he murmured against her lips.

"I missed you, too," she said with a chuckle as she pulled away from his grasping lips. "But we need to stop that."

"Why?" Angel said as he looked at her with what he knew to be a very endearing 'puppy dog' pout as he tilted his head and looked at her. "I missed you," he repeated again.

Laughing lightly, Brennan smiled as she said, "And, I missed you, too, as I said, but if we start that now we'll never eat."

"So?" Angel tried again, arching an eyebrow at her. "Come on, Bren. I want to play with you."

Smiling at him, Brennan shook her head lightly. "And, I want to play with you, but not right now because I brought home dinner," she said with a crooked grin. "Or, rather, what will become dinner once you assemble it into one of your _pièces de résistance_..." She flicked her forefinger over his navel and pulled free of his grasp, turning around and walking out into the kitchen, twirling her skirt with a flourish as she glanced back at him over her shoulder.

"You're an evil, wicked cocktease, lass," he said with a laugh, plucking his towel open and letting it fall to the floor as he watched her smirking from the kitchen. He smirked as he stood there for a moment, tense and half-aroused, wearing not a single stitch of clothing. "I swear, you're trying to drive me crazy or make my balls turn blue and fall off."

Brennan glanced at him, a faint smile on her lips as she let her eyes roam approvingly over his naked form, but she said nothing, chuckling as she began to unpack her purchases.

"You'll be punished later for that," he told her in a mockingly ominous tone as he slipped on a T-shirt and pulled on a pair of light khaki cotton trousers. He watched her bleed the plucked chickens, draining his dinner into a jar before she took one of the birds, wrapped it in butcher paper, securing it with a string before tucking it into the icebox along with a cork-stoppered bottle of what he presumed was pig's blood, bought off the _carnicero _at the outdoor market a few blocks away from the_ pensión._

Angel couldn't help but smile at seeing the glass bottle of pig's blood. He'd never once asked her to buy him blood, but she knew without asking that, while he appreciated the animal blood she could transfigure from red wine, he preferred the taste and the belly-filling feeling of drinking real blood. In Chicago, he would buy his blood on a daily basis from an Italian butcher, Salvatore Costanzo, who never questioned the odd, dark-eyed Irishman who came in first thing each morning before the twilight gave way to dawn and paid cash for blood that Sal had planned to throw out anyway. But on his arrival in Mérida, he didn't have to seek out a _carnicero _to sell him blood, because Brennan had already worked out an arrangement with Manuel Jiménez, the butcher at the _mercado, _to sell her whatever blood he drained out of the animals he slaughtered each day. The thought that she had done all that without him needing to ask warmed his belly and made him adore her even more than he did before.

He pulled his black suspenders over his shoulders and added with a snicker, "But because I'm a nice guy, I'll feed you first, so that you'll have the energy to keep up with me when I commence said punishment."

Arching an eyebrow at him, she smirked in return. "How kind of you. But, in the meantime, until such punishments commence, are you going to stop yammering at some point and get in here and start cooking?" she asked him, smacking his bottom as he walked into the kitchen, rubbing his hands together as he surveyed her purchases arrayed on the counter in front of him.

"All that, lass, and you still can't keep your hands off my ass for more than three seconds," he snickered.

She made a _pffffft _sound and stuck her tongue out at him, unwilling to respond because, at some level, she knew there was some truth to his quip.

"Step away from the stove, woman," he said in a broad, low voice, bumping her hip with his as he reached for the knife and the scarred, lightly bleached wooden cutting board. He washed his hands in the sink and began working the blade to cut up the chicken at the joints.

Brennan watched him as he rocked the heel of the blade across the connective tissues that held the legs and wings to the body and quickly separated the bird into pieces. "I never would've guessed a man such as yourself would be such an enthusiastic cook," Brennan observed wryly as she poured herself a glass of the spicy, full-bodied Casa Madero wine. "Never mind an excellent one."

"Right," he guffawed with a knowing nod of his head. "I'll try not to get too offended at your insinuation that the only skills I have at home are the ones in the bedroom," he said in feigned indignation.

"That's not what I said, sweetness," she said with a roll of her eyes.

"Sure," he grunted, grinning at her as he finished cutting up the chicken and threw all of its parts, except for the head and organs, into the pot of boiling water. "It's okay, lass. Just remember, hmmm? I'm a constant surprise." He rinsed the knife and cutting board in the cold water that splashed in the small kitchen sink and then started chopping the white onion, green cilantro, brightly plump red roma tomatoes, and shiny red, green, and yellow peppers she'd picked up at the _mercado_.

After another minute, he looked up from his chopping and paused, grinning at her as she leaned over the other edge of the counter, holding her wine glass at a lazy angle.

"Feeling okay over there, hmmm?" he asked her, arching his eyebrow expectantly. "You look a little wobbly."

"What?" Brennan's brows furrowed deeply at his question. "Of course, I'm fine," she said with a wave of her hand. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Angel laughed and cocked his head to the side. "You kinda tied one on pretty good last night, Bren," he said.

Shaking her head, Brennan quickly retorted, "No, I didn't."

Snickering, Angel said, "Bren. Come on. You know you did. You were trying to keep up with me. You should know better than to try to keep pace drinking tequila with a full-grown male vampire."

Waving him off, Brennan scoffed at his statement. "Oh, please," she snorted in mock disdain. "I am _not _hungover." Seeing the skeptical, unimpressed look he gave her, she rolled her eyes. "Angel, I'm not."

"Okay, fine," he conceded reluctantly. "Maybe you're not hungover, but you were definitely drunk last night."

"No, I wasn't," she stubbornly insisted.

"Yes, you were," Angel retorted with a sharp chuckle. "The way you were downing those stupid 'tequila daisy' things that Manuel kept making for you..." He smirked thinking of how quickly she drained five of the cocktails—a powerful mix of tequila, lime juice, sugar, and Cointreau—as they made their way through the plaza. He felt his groin tighten as he remembered how, after her fifth one, he'd managed by some miracle to get her out of the plaza before she'd shoved her hands down the front of his trousers, and he'd hurried her down a side-street back to the _pensión. _

"I may've become slightly intoxicated," she hedged, a crooked smile on her lips as she recalled how she'd teased him on the way back from the _fiesta _and how his self-control had snapped the moment the door of the _pensión _had closed behind them, "but I wouldn't say I was—"

"Oh, come on—you totally were," he laughed, remembering how she'd felt in his arms as they danced the night before, her body so pliant and warm against his as she let him lead, which was more than a little out of character for her. "But you're really cute when you're drunk."

Brennan's nose scrunched up in a grimace. "Cute?" she asked with an edge of the obvious distaste that she felt at the application of the adjective to her person present in her voice.

For his part, Angel merely gave her a good-natured shrug. "Adorable," he said. "You, toasted on tequila, were very adorable—and very, very sexy."

Brennan pursed her lips for a moment and then shook her head, a familiar move that Angel recognized as one that meant she was going to dismiss his compliment by attempting to change the subject. Since he more interesting in making certain that she remained in an amenable mood to his amorous advances than in necessarily teasing her, he let the subject drop when Brennan was quiet for a moment and then changed the subject as expected.

Pointing at the cutting board where the onion and peppers that he'd chopped up lay waiting, Brennan said, "You know, I never really was one to think that after all the time we've been together, you'd just now be cooking for me...or that I'd agree to it since you're going to do it without even tasting what you're making me."

Angel arched a sharply skeptical eyebrow. "Oh, come on, Bren," he needled her. "You know I've been wanting to cook for you for a while. You just wouldn't agree to it before I caught you off-guard last night."

Brennan frowned, but then said, "Be that as it may, let it not be said that I don't honor my commitments. You got me to agree to let you cook for me, and I ate it this morning, didn't I?"

"Oh, yeah," he grinned. "You did. But I think that maybe the only reason you really did that is because your still-drunken but not hungover state in the wee hours this morning had something to do with me persuading you, mmm?" he suggested. "Or are you saying that because you weren't hungover you willingly, ehhh, acquiesced to a demonstration of my fine culinary skills, lass?" He grinned and shot her a narrow-eyed look. "So which is it, hmm? Because I'm a little bit confused."

Brennan snorted a laugh. "The nominal quantity of intoxicants in my system might've lowered my inhibitions to the point I agreed to your generous offer you made this morning," she admitted. "But, you know I never back away from an agreement I've made, Angel. A deal's a deal, so you know I always honor a bargain I make."

"Right," he said with pursed lips. "But, you still seemed a bit drunk this morning," he chuckled. After a moment, he thought about what he'd said and thought back to what she'd said a few moments earlier. "Besides," he said, taking his knife as he resumed his chopping. "It's not that I haven't taste-tested my cooking because I don't want to...it's just that my taste buds aren't worth a shit and everything other than blood pretty much tastes like wood pulp when you're a vampire." Brennan gave him a skeptical look that caused him to add, "Besides, it's not like I'm not doing this without any gauging of what my efforts are putting forth, lass."

Arching an eyebrow at him, Brennan asked, "Oh?"

"Yeah," he replied. "Well, my sense of smell is still good, so that's how I'm doing it."

Still doubtful, she asked, "So, you're telling me that my dinner is being put together by your sense of smell?"

Grinning at her, Angel nodded, "Yup. Indeed. I'm cooking by smell, more or less." He punctuated his final words with a waggle of his eyebrows. "Impressive, huh?"

Brennan laughed, unable to help herself at his grin. "Maybe," she said, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly. "More or less," she added with a shrug. She leaned over the counter and watched him for a minute as he finished dicing the peppers, then asked, "So, what sort of fine victuals are you preparing tonight?"

"_Caldo de pollo de _Angel," he answered, using the dull grey spine of the knife to sweep the minced herb and diced tomatoes, onions and peppers into the boiling 4.5 quart Dutch oven pot. He grinned at her, then said, "It's the usual _caldo de pollo_, I suppose, with a little Angel twist." A cocky grin hung off his lips as he began shucking the ears of sweet pale white corn she'd bought, breaking them into thirds with his bare hands before dropping them into the pot. Angel then reached into the bag and retrieved a handful of jalapeños and assorted chile peppers, then laid them out on the cutting board and began to chop them, too. "So, you really like my cooking?" he asked her, his voice wavering a little on the edges.

"Well, I did like it when you made me breakfast this morning despite the fact that you had to trick me into agreeing to let you cook for me," she said with a reassuring smile as she walked back around into the kitchen and snaked her slender suntanned arms around his waist as he scooped the sliced jalapeños and diced chiles into the pot. "So, I assume I'll like your dinner just as well, despite my teasing of you," she finished. She gave him a little hug before she then asked, "So, how long does it need to cook, _mi _Angel?" She pronounced his name in the Spanish style, with a soft 'g' and a twinkle in her eye.

"Mmmm," he murmured as he took one last glance at the pot of broth, which had gone from boiling to barely a simmer after having the chicken, corn, onions, and peppers added. "A little while," he said vaguely as he turned around, wiped his hands on his trousers before cupping her face between his hands and pulling her mouth to his. "Why?" he asked, brushing his lips against hers, hesitating for a moment before kissing her lightly. "You don't have any ideas of how to pass the time while the _caldo _cooks, do you?"

"Mmmm," she grinned back at him. "Yes, I might have some ideas," she said quietly, sliding her fingers underneath his suspenders as she tugged at them gently.

"Hmmmm," he replied with a throaty chuckle as he felt her lips press light kisses along the bottom edge of his jaw and chin. "Do you now, _señora bonita_?"

Brennan gave him a coy look and pulled away. "What about the rest of dinner?" she asked. "All you're making is soup?"

"Well, there'll be rice," he said. "But that needs to wait until the _caldo _is ready. And I have some nice flour tortillas, too, but I made those up before you got home.

"So I don't merit fresh tortillas?" she asked teasingly. "I'm hurt, Angel."

"They're a half-hour old, Bren," he said with raised eyebrows. "If you'd bought them at the _mercado _they wouldn't be any fresher than that."

"Maybe," she said. She then flashed him a grin. "So, you baked for me, hmm? I love it."

He chuckled a bit as he took a step closer to her. "I just bet you do." Reaching for her hips and pulling her close again, he then added, "I think you love my hot body, too. So, tell me—should I go in there and put my towel back on? I know you can't resist me when I'm wearing just a towel, huh? I mean, I can't blame you really since I'm such a damn sexy devil, but even still..."

She didn't answer him with words, but gave his suspenders another, slightly sharper tug before she grabbed his hand and turned around, dragging him back to the bedroom without so much more than a glance back at the pot that simmered in the kitchen. She tugged him through the doorway into the bedroom and released his hand as she made her way towards the bed. She didn't make it very far before she felt his big hands grab her by the hips and twirl her around again, his long, thick fingers curling around her waist, his fingertips pressing into the soft flesh of her rear end as he pulled her towards him.

"This is so nice, being here, and being with you like this," he said. "It's almost like being back in Chicago." His nostrils flared a little as he inhaled a whiff of her sweat, still slightly tinged with the light floral scent of her nearly-faded perfume. "I'm gonna miss you when you go back...you know, out there into the jungle with your Mayan pyramids and everything." After a moment of reflection, he asked, "Roads still washed out?"

An unseasonably early monsoon had passed over the Yucatán two weeks before, bringing strong winds and torrential rains that inundated Mérida and the areas to the south and east. The vicious storm had washed out the hard-packed dirt roads that connected the city with the jungled plain where Brennan's archaeological site was located, stranding her in town until repairs could be made and the roads shored up so cars and trucks could get through without bogging down in muddy ruts or slipping into the ditches along the side of the road.

Brennan murmured an inaudible reply as their mouths crashed together in a kiss, their lips clutching at one another, lightly at first and more possessively as the space between their bodies seemed to collapse. Angel pulled away for a moment and gazed into her pale, glittering blue eyes, then tilted his head to the side, leaning in and, after a second of hesitation, covered her mouth with his again, a low rumble rattling in his throat as he felt her tongue sweep into his mouth. He hummed against her mouth as his hips bucked into hers and his hands slid under her dress and pale cream colored silk half-slip. A low, primitive growl sounded in his throat as he cupped her hips in his hands and pulled her flush against him, his fingers fanning out over the silky skin of her bare bottom.

"You naughty, naughty lass," he snickered as their mouths parted. "Going out in public without bloomers..."

"It's cooler that way," she laughed, leaning her head back with a sigh as she felt him thrust his hip into hers, leaving no doubt in her mind that he wanted her as badly as she wanted him. "I mean, it's not like I was a complete slut, Angel. I did have some foundation garments on so that people couldn't see through my dress. That's why I wore the slip. But, even still, the heat and the humidity today were so bad outside with the sun making things even worse—"

Cutting her off, he laughed a gruff chuckle at her. "Mmmm," he interrupted her.

"What?" Brennan responded with a breathy sigh.

"I'm just thinking," Angel told her. "It's a good thing you weren't goin' around without bloomers last night," he said in a deep, lusty voice that faded nearly to a whisper as his lips formed words against the tender flesh of her earlobe. "I'd have dragged your drunk, hot little self into that alley behind the _catedral, _pulled that pretty red dress up over this sweet ass of yours, and had my way with you right then and there. The music was loud enough, no one would've heard you when you screamed my name."

"Mmmm," she murmured, chuckling as she heard the vague hint of his long-faded brogue peeking through on the edge of his speech. "You haven't done that to me in, hell, forty-odd years," she snickered. "I wasn't sure you still had it in you."

"Huh," he grunted back. "You know I do, woman. With you, I always do." He paused as he narrowed his eyes and gave her another hungry look before he continued. "But I don't wanna talk about what I have in _me_," he said. "Instead, I'm more thinkin' of what I wanna put in _you_." A low growl rumbled in his throat. "God, I want you so badly, lass. You make me so crazy in this dress. The way you always make me crazy." His tongue darted out and flicked the bottom of her earlobe. "So gorgeous, lass, so damn gorgeous."

"God, Angel," she sighed at hearing his sensual words. She felt his mouth migrate along her jaw, nipping as he went along. "Tell me," she whispered as she savored the feel of his soft, cool lips plucking against the skin of her neck. "Tell me..."

"What?" he asked, his face flushing with want. "What...do you...want me...to tell you?" His words fell in clumps, punctuated by the light kisses he was placing along the length of her collarbone as he hooked his thumbs under the neckline of her dress.

Brennan was quiet for a moment, so long it seemed to Angel, that he almost forgot what they were waiting for besides his burning need to plunge himself inside her. But, after another moment, he finally remembered when she answered in a soft voice.

"Tell me you'll stay," she breathed as she felt a flash of desire, her body pulsing warmly with each kiss he placed along her clavicle. "Tell me you'll stay with me until I have to go back," she said quietly, a pleading thread on the edge of her voice. "I want you here with me. I don't want you to go. Say you'll stay with me. Please?"

Angel pouted his lips against her smooth, soft skin, then caressed the round edges of her shoulders with the palms of his big hands as he pushed her away. He felt his chest tighten at hearing her plea, and his gut swirled with competing desires—on the one hand, a yearning to be with her, as completely as possible for as long as he could, his ears filling with the sound of her soul thrumming inside of him, and yet on the other hand, a voice in the back of his head reminding him that she had a destiny to fulfill and that he had to be the one to pull away lest she languish in his arms and never make of herself what she was fated to be.

"Tell me," she insisted, her voice peaking as her eyes widened in response to his silence. "Tell me you won't leave me. Tell me you want me, that you want to stay with me. Please, Angel? Please?"

"Bren," he whispered, bringing his hands once more to cradle her square jaw between his palms. His deep, warm brown eyes stared into hers, and he swallowed hard, his Adam's apple dipping low in his throat as he pursed his lips. He gazed deeply into her pale eyes and licked his lips self-consciously, holding the tip of his tongue between his lips as he watched her chest rise and fall with each breath. Holding her against him, he felt her pulse quicken and he sensed an anxiety about her. He tilted his head to one side and opened his mouth to speak. "I-I..Bren, I..." He closed his eyes and sighed. "I didn't think it would be this hard," he admitted. "I mean, I knew it would be hard, but...I've missed you so much, you have no idea."

"I do," she said instantly, her head jerking up as she tilted her head and tried to make him understand what flash of emotion she felt at his words. "Oh, God, Angel—I do understand because...well, because it's...I've missed you more than I can even tell you."

"I want to be with you, Bren," he said. "I've missed you so much, and I want to be with you as much as I can." He pressed his lips together in a firm line and gave her a determined nod. "I'll stay until you have to go back," he said. "And then, you can come see me at Christmas in New York. That'll make it easier, hmmm? If we know when we'll definitely see each other again. So you can come to me, or...you can send me a cable and I'll come spend Yuletide with you down here." Her blue eyes glimmered with emotion as she nodded mutely. "I will," he insisted. "You know I can't stay here forever, but you know I will always come to see you." He drew his thumb across her cheek, wiping away a single tear that had broken loose when she blinked. "Always, Bren. We may be apart, but we'll always be together, mmm?"

"Really?" she sighed, her shoulders slumping at his words. "Do you really think so, Angel? Because I have to admit that I'd always hoped that, but I was too afraid to tell you that—"

"Shhhh," he whispered, pulling her hips back against his as he gazed deep into her eyes. "I'll always be there for you," he said, placing his hand over her heart, murmuring quietly as he felt her heartbeat throb against his fingers. "And you'll always be there for me. You and me—no matter what happens, Bren...we're forever, lass."

Brennan was quiet for a minute and then sighed softly, "I've missed you so much...so very much, Angel. It's been torture being without you. I mean, during the days it's not too bad because working at the site keeps me occupied, but at night? The nights without you are tortuous. They're never ending. And, if I'm lucky, and I fall asleep, I still dream of you, and when I wake up in the morning, it makes me even more sad. I just—"

"Bren," he said quietly. "I know it's hard, lass—I know. Believe me, I know. But we both know that you need to do this thing you must do, hmm? And until you're done, and you've done what you need to do and so will I, know and trust in us that neither one of us is going anywhere, I swear."

She stared at him for a minute, then nodded again. "Okay," she said with only a slight waver in her voice. "Okay. I know that. I believe you."

"Do you?" he asked as he studied the way her forehead crinkled and her face paled a bit as her nostrils flared, betraying her nervousness and uncertainty. "Really, Bren?"

She stared at his warm eyes for a long minute, drawing strength and reassurance from what she saw in them as she always did, and when she answered again, her resolve was stronger. "Yes," she told him. "Yes, I believe you, Angel. I do. I promise I do."

"You're part of me, Bren," he said to her, his voice quiet but firm in its reassurance. "I can't ever leave you, even if I wanted to, and I don't, you know? You know I don't want to leave you, be away from you. Not ever."

"l know that," she said, reaching out as she cupped his smooth, clean-shaven jaw. Angel gazed back at her, his chocolate eyes shimmering with moisture as his mouth gaped open. For a moment, he looked away, averting his eyes as his brow creased slightly, which she had long ago recognized was a sign that he was doubtful about something but afraid to voice it. "Really, I do."

"Do you?" he said, as he reached down once more for the hem of her dress. "Or do you need me to show you just why I can't ever leave you?" he asked, pulling the dress and underslip over her head and letting them fall to her feet in a whisper as he revealed her beautiful body to his eager, loving view once more.

"I wouldn't mind being reminded," she smiled at him. "If you want to..."

"Oh, I do," he reassured her, caressing her soft auburn hair as he leaned in to kiss her, his lips barely brushing against hers as he nudged her towards the bed. "You know I do..."

A silence of sorts fell between them as they spoke not in words but in long, soulful gazes, soft, delicate caresses as their fingertips roamed over the long planes of naked skin, and a series of ever-louder sighs, and murmurs punctuated by soft laughs and long, low moans echoed between the whitewashed walls of the _pensión_'s bedroom. The coils of the mattress creaked faintly as she fell back onto the bed and he quickly followed her, covering her body with his. He moved over her and then inside of her, the boundary between their bodies no longer readily discernible in the minutes of rolling motion before they shattered, one after the other as the cool blue energy crackled in the space between and around them at the moment each achieved release.

As he felt a haze of repletion settle over him like a fog, he rolled off of her and collapsed onto the bed, beckoning her to assume her favored place in the crook where his arm and shoulder met. Brennan snuggled in there with a contented, kittenish sigh, stroking his sweat-damp chest with her forefinger as a rumble of thunder outside heralded the start of another soaking rainstorm.

"Sounds like you might be staying with me a bit while longer," she murmured, turning her head to place a soft kiss on the side of his neck. "By the sound of that, all that work they did the last few days fixing the roads may be washing away down the side of a ravine as we speak."

He shrugged and snaked his arm more tightly around her waist as he raised his chin off her head to speak. "You won't hear me complaining," he said. "So long as I don't hear you complaining about my _caldo de _Angel." The _pensión _had, in the time that they'd been making love, filled with the smell of the chicken soup that simmered on the stove.

"I don't think it's done yet," she said as she drew her fingernail over his nipple, eliciting a quiet hiss of pleasure from him.

"No," he agreed in a low voice as he pulled her on top of him with a wide, toothy grin. "No, it's not ready quite yet. It still needs a bit more time, I think...and so do we." He threaded his fingers through her hair as he brushed it away from her beautiful, square-jawed face, then pulled her in for a kiss. She moaned a little as his tongue swept into her mouth, and she tasted the sharp flavor of the gold-hued _anejo _he'd been sipping while she was out at the _mercado._

"Definitely needs more time," she agreed as she let him pull her close for another, longer, deeper kiss.

* * *

**A/N: **_Awww. Wasn't that sweet?_

_See? We can deliver romantic Angel/Bren fluff when the need arises. We sure hope you enjoyed that. We enjoyed pulling together all the assorted images of Mérida that have been bouncing around the collective Dharmasera mindspace (a strange and sordid place indeed, if you pause to think about it). _

_As an editorial note, for those who are wondering (and also for those who weren't), the cathedral referenced is real, and the songs mentioned/quoted are also real and period-appropriate. The beverage that Brennan celebrated Cinco de Mayo with, the 'tequila daisy' is also real, the precursor to the now-ubiquitous margarita, which might just be the Official Cocktail of Dharmasera. (We already have an Official Hard Liquor, of course: Jameson Irish Whiskey, LOL.) Lest you think we'd lost our touch, haha._

_We have a few more of these crossover oneshots in the hopper. The next one coming along will probably be one set in Cairo and Giza, Egypt. We'll have one where Brennan chats with a couple of the other women who have known Angelus about yet a fourth woman who has kept his company. And there might be one coming along with our new favorite odd couple, Brennan and Spike._

_Please let us know what you thought of this little romantic interlude set in Old Mexico. We know you don't have to, but we'd be really grateful if you'd take a minute to leave us a short review. We try really hard to give you folks good reading material with lots of juicy details and rich texture. Let us know how we did._

_As always, thanks for reading. You guys are great. Your continued support keeps us inspired to keep writing :-)_


	5. Moonlight Over The Pyramids

**A Compendium of Lost Moments**

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**By:** dharmamonkey & Lesera128

**Rated: **T

**Disclaimer: **_We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own._

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**A/N: **_For those who read "Making Him Beg" and "Comfort on the Edge of Reason," you remember that Brennan and Angel parted ways in 1898, but agreed to meet in Cairo the following year. Both of them were in Cairo in 1899, but yet they did not meet. Angel, weighed down with the burden of his newfound soul and wracked with gut-wrenching guilt, saw her there, waiting for him, but he couldn't bring himself to leave the safety of the shadows. In this story, Brennan and Angel, both of them greatly changed from the people they were in 1899, finally return to Cairo. __This story is set seven weeks after the events described in "The After Party."_

_Enjoy!_

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**Chapter 5: Moonlight Over the Pyramids**

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**Cairo, Egypt ~ December 21, 2004**

Angel arrived late to the lecture, as she knew he would.

His late arrival didn't surprise her. In fact, it was quite rare when anything Angel did surprised her. His habitual tardiness, for example, was nothing new. It was merely his way, she knew, and it always had been for as long as she'd known him.

She didn't know if it was because, as a lasting remnant from his days as Angelus, he liked to make a dramatic entrance. Or, perhaps, she sometimes wondered, if it was because Angel hated being in large groups and so closely adhered to an arrive last/leave first mentality out of habit. She even wondered if perhaps it had to do with the fact that he always just seemed to be running about five or ten minutes behind everyone else. Whatever the root cause, his inability to be punctual was one of the things that Brennan had come to love about Angel over the years. Angel's chronic lateness was but one of the countless threads of his peculiar singularity that formed the tapestry of the man he was. Just as she knew that his favorite colors were red and black, his favorite sport was hockey, his favorite sports team was the Flyers, his preferred type of non-human blood came from pigs, he liked Jameson's whiskey and Irish Breakfast tea, he liked boxer briefs over the knit boxers she preferred, and that he enjoyed making love in any position as long as he could see her eyes when they both came, so could she count on the fact that he was never, _ever _on time.

On this particular occasion, Angel was more than his customary five or ten minutes late. He didn't actually slip in the back until well after the twenty-minute mark. Brennan was in the middle of her presentation at the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. She was speaking on her analysis of the craniofacial features and osteological markers exhibited by the mummy found in the KV55 tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1907 when she glanced to the back of the room and saw him standing there. He was dressed in the sharp but casual way he'd taken to since taking over as the CEO of Wolfram & Hart's L.A. office. As she looked at him, for a couple of seconds, she nearly lost her train of thought and place in her prepared speech as she admired him standing there in a pressed, starched black button-down shirt with a khaki-colored light wool sportscoat and slacks. He stood there in silence, leaning against the wall with his legs crossed and his hands in his pockets, his lips pursed as he tried to suppress a smile as he focused his dark brown eyes directly on her. For a brief second, their eyes met, and he winked at her with a widening grin causing her to inadvertently pause mid-sentence. His ever-infectious grin caused her to reflexively smile back at him before she started to speak again as Angel watched her, his warm brown eyes alight with immense pride as she continued with her presentation.

Even as he watched her, and knew he was in Cairo three days before Christmas, Angel found himself surprised that events had actually transpired in a way to bring the pair of them to Egypt so they were in the same place at the same time.

"_What is it?" he'd asked her, rubbing the towel over his damp chest and then his crotch as he watched her standing in the corner of his bedroom, a plush royal blue terry-cloth towel wrapped snugly around her torso as she read an email on her smartphone, her face illuminated in the half-dark room by the glow from the device's little screen._

_Brennan glanced up at him, a bit reluctantly, Angel thought, before she answered his question. The look immediately told Angel that whatever news Brennan had just received it had the rare effect of making her unusually pleased with herself. "I, uhh, was just checking my work email_—"

_Unable to help himself, Angel groaned and rolled his eyes at her. "Come on, Bren. We haven't even been out of the shower for what...five minutes? And you promised. No work stuff for the rest of the night for either one of us, remember?"_

_Biting her bottom lip in a way that betrayed a bit of agitation to those who knew her best, since Brennan knew she had been caught, she could only shrug her shoulders as she nodded at him. "I know we agreed. And, I'm sorry. I just wanted to check one little thing that I've been waiting to hear on, and_—"

_Coming over to her, Angel's brow crinkled slightly as he asked, "And what news did you get that was so important that it's more interesting to you than I am right now?"_

_Arching an auburn eyebrow at him, Brennan said, "It's not more important than you, I promise, Angel. It's just that I just got confirmation from the American Research Center in Egypt concerning the date of a lecture I am going to give in Cairo in late December," she said, her voice wavering slightly as she reread the email to make sure she got all the details. "It's quite an opportunity, Angel, with the conference being put on in conjunction with the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, which is really the center of international research in this area." She stopped for a beat and then continued, "And, well, I really wasn't expecting that the conference's organizers would accept my paper after what happened the last time with me being unable to attend at the last minute because of administrative issues with my visa, and..." The words tumbled from her mouth in rapid succession, leaving no doubt as to her excitement. As her voice trailed off, she saw his facial expression turn slack and his warm brown eyes blink then look away. She cocked her head to the side. "Angel," she said, "I've been waiting for three months to see if it would get approved and now I just found out, really at the last possible minute, when I'd really written it off that it's actually happening, I'm sorry. It's just that I'm very, __very__ excited, and now that I know I get to go back to Cairo after so many years in just a few weeks_—"

"_Huh." Angel's lips pouted a little as he cut her off with a petulant grunt. He didn't want her to go. Maybe it was selfish, but as his jaw hardened, he felt a swirl in his belly at the thought of her leaving. An almost inaudible growl sounded in his throat as he cursed himself for not saying something to her earlier. He'd been meaning to speak to her about coming back to Los Angeles to spend the last two weeks of the year with him. Although they'd had a rocky start to that year's Halloween visit—with Brennan nearly walking out the door when she'd found out that his late return the night of her arrival was due, in part, to the fact that he'd had a sexual encounter, albeit an involuntary one, with the half-demon woman Eve—he'd persuaded her to extend her stay for two weeks, and after those two weeks, he couldn't imagine spending more than a couple of months without seeing her again. _

_Everything in his life seemed a bit brighter, every annoyance a bit easier to bear, knowing as he did that he'd be able to make love to her each morning and come home to her before falling asleep with her nestled in his arms each night. In a way, it reminded him of their picturesque days when they'd lived together in her apartment in Chicago in the 1920s, __a__nd the idea that they'd given up that life, and that happiness—even though they'd given it up for all the right reasons—made his chest ache with deep longing. _

_Just a few days—scarcely longer than a week—had showed him that the happiness they'd left behind was, in fact, attainable. His life had taken on a different rhythm in the week and a half or so since she'd come to L.A., and he found himself slowing down to enjoy things—like a hot cup of tea sipped while listening to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5—that he hadn't allowed himself to indulge in since he couldn't remember when. Even his secretary, Harmony, had noticed he seemed a bit more relaxed in recent days, and not just for the obvious, smirk-inducing reason that Spike had quipped off-hand about._

_Brennan saw the shaded look of incipient brooding descend over his handsome, rugged face._

"_It's really an excellent opportunity," she explained to him with a thoughtful look. "Nevermind it's been so long since I've been back in Cairo or that I have a personal connection to KV55." Angel's eyes narrowed and he shook his head slightly as she rattled off the numbers that sounded to him more like the naval call-sign of a submarine or a new men's hairstyling product than the name of an ancient Egyptian tomb. _

"_I bet you didn't know it," she continued, "but I was actually on an expedition in the Valley of the Kings when that tomb was opened back in 1907. I was working at a different site, of course, but when I heard that Edward Ayrton had two visiting physicians—medical doctors, not anatomists much less physical anthropologists since there really was no such thing as a physical anthropologist back at that point in time—take a look at the remains _in situ _who identified the mummy as being female, I made it a point to see the remains myself when they were removed from Amarna and taken back to Cairo. I convinced Grafton Elliot Smith to let me join him when he examined the remains a couple of months later, and the two of us agreed that, taken as a whole, the remains clearly belonged to a male, albeit one with some very unusual skeletal morphologies..."_

_Angel rubbed his eyes and blinked a couple of times, lost in the gush of dates and numbers with all the hoity-toit English names and strange place names. He was quite sure his eyes were about to glaze over when her babble about 'unusual skeletal morphologies' caught his attention somehow and he shook his head. "It was a weird-looking body, you mean," he said with a faint smile and an arched eyebrow._

_Brennan grinned back at him, amused that her longtime lover, who had a limited formal education—having more or less dropped out of school mentally back in grammar school, despite his merchant father's efforts to keep him academically engaged by way of hired (and, at least as Angel described them, 'priggish') tutors—and had no university training whatsoever, still managed to understand some part of what she'd just said. He had a habit of speaking and behaving in a way that made him appear far less intelligent than she knew him to be, and it puzzled her sometimes why he kept up this act. _

"_In a crude way of speaking, yes," she said with a veiled grin and an amused shrug as her eyes locked with his and she knew by the almost imperceptible narrowing of his warm brown eyes and the flicker behind them that he knew exactly what she'd just said. His lips twitched and curved up slightly betraying the fact that he knew that he'd been caught playing dumb by the one woman in the world who knew he wasn't. _

"_There's been a longstanding debate in the academic community of Egyptologists as to whether the remains found at site KV55 were those of the 18th Dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten, his mother Queen Tiye, the wife of Amenhotep III, or some other member of the royal family. My opinion has for a long time now been that, yes, the KV55 remains are, in fact, those of Akhenaten, and I've been asked to come to Cairo in December to give a talk on my findings in this regard based on some new scans that I've been able to conduct at the Jeffersonian based off of old modeling data from previous CAT scans and some high-resonance scans that were done in the 1990s."_

"_That's great," Angel said half-heartedly, there being no doubt from the tone of his voice that he was sorely disappointed at the news of spending the long week between Christmas and New Years' without her. _

_He'd felt this way before: torn between, on the one hand, excitement at hearing how excited she was about her work and her travels and, on the other hand, dread at having to see her ride off again into the proverbial sunset leaving him alone, once more. The solitude didn't used to bother him—he'd spent decades of his centuries-long life largely in self-imposed solitude—but just he as he'd found himself quickly getting used to days bookended by her company, so too did he find himself unnerved by the notion of being alone again. _

_Brennan pursed her lips between her teeth and watched him as he wrapped his towel around his waist. She couldn't help but smile as she thought of how many showers they'd shared in the prior two weeks and how much she would miss his company when she returned to Washington after the Veteran's Day holiday. Suddenly, a logical thought occurred to her, causing her to smile as she looked up at him._

"_What?" Angel asked, some of his disappointed gloom at the thought of being without her immediately being dispelled. "I know that look, lass. And it usually means trouble for me. Granted, it's usually the good kind of trouble for me." He chuckled quietly at his own joke, then added "But it's still trouble all the same."_

_Still grinning at him, she responded simply. "Come with me," she said abruptly._

"_What?" he coughed__**, **__completely unprepared for the words he'd just heard fall from her slender lips. He blinked, then reached up, rubbing his hand through his damp hair as he searched her face for a sign, perhaps a flicker of laughter in her bright blue eyes, that would confirm that she was, in fact, joking. But all he saw in her eyes was a seriousness, almost a pleading, as the few beats stretched into long seconds of silence between them. "What do you mean? To Egypt?"_

_Nodding at him, Brennan said, "Yes, that's exactly what I mean. I want you to come with me."_

_Staring at her in disbelief, Angel said, "No, Bren."_

"_What?" she asked, a look of surprise crossing her face. "You don't want to be with me?"_

_His eyes widening once more as he took the meaning of her words, Angel quickly shook his head. "No," he said. "That's...that's not it at all. You know I want to be with you, Bren, all the damn time. It's just that...well, I-I...I mean, you don't want me...you've got that conference and I'd just be a distraction—"_

"_I __do__ want you," she insisted, cutting him off sharply. "I always want you, Angel. And, more importantly, you're never a distraction to me. So, come with me...to Egypt."_

_He stared at her for a minute, his response obviously wavering, and Brennan decided to press her advantage._

"_Come on, Angel," she tempted him. "You don't want to be without me after the last couple of weeks anymore than I want to be without you. And, besides, it'll be fun. We can take the firm's jet, so you don't have to worry about timing your flight to arrive after nightfall, and we can arrange for a car with necro-tempered glass. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Wolfram and Hart has a small branch office there that you can't call up and tell them you want the VIP treatment since they seem to have setups in every town and city from here to Maluku and back. Besides, December is probably the best time all year for you to come to Egypt, because the days are shortest."_

"_I dunno, Bren," he said hesitantly. Angel looked down at the floor and flexed his toes against the dense pile of the wool carpet beneath his bare feet, staring for a few long moments before glancing up again. He sighed, wondering silently whether it wasn't high time for him to finally let the demands of his job as CEO pay off for once, after all the times and ways it had encroached on his life in a less than positive way. After a few more seconds of thought, he shrugged, unsure still whether he should give in to the very tempting offer as he brought his eyes to meet hers and opened his mouth to speak. "I mean..."_

_Sensing that he was on the edge of making his decision, and that she had a 60/40 shot by her estimation that she could convince him to come with her, Brennan decided to put on the full court press. She set her phone on the nightstand with a loud clatter and walked up to him, letting the towel that was wrapped around her torso fall to the ground in a silent _woosh.

_A sigh escaped from his half-open mouth as his eyes suddenly broke off their shared gaze and dropped to her breasts, hungrily taking in the sight of her stunning, shapely body as he felt his own tense with growing need. "Jesus, Bren," he groaned, his voice choked as his throat tightened with desire. "You drive me crazy, lass," he told her with a shake of his head. When she merely gave him a half-smile by way of an answer, Angel then said, "Yeah, you drive me fuckin' crazy and moreover, you know it, don't you?" He narrowed his gaze as he looked up, jerking his eyes from her naked form. "You tempting minx," he said in a half-mocking growl. "You're not above playing a little dirty, huh? Not that I don't know that already 'cause I do more than most."_

"_Angel," she said, cupping her hand around his faintly-stubbled jaw and stroking her fingertips over his cheek as her voice softened. "If nothing else, then think of this before you make your decision, hmmm? You went all the way to Cairo a century ago, but you didn't come and actually join me there like we'd agreed. This time, I want you to really join me in Cairo, okay? To be with me there. It's not often people get a second chance to do things over, but this time we appear to have a unique opportunity." __Brennan leaned forward slightly, letting her breath fall on his chin as her lips pursed, then parted again as a soft, sultry murmur sounded from the back of her throat. She closed her eyes for a moment, then slowly opened them again and raised her slender, dark eyebrow with a pleading look. "Angel," she said, her voice low and warm, heavy with gravity as she watched his eyes darken. "Let's make it right this time, you and me." _

_Angel looked down at his bare feet and swallowed, then brought his head up again and slowly nodded. H__e swallowed, a warm, heavy swirling sensation low in his gut tugging at him to give in, give up his self-sacrificing solitude and to join her. _"Okay," he said. "If that's what you really want, I'll come with you."

"_Excellent," she told him, caressing the pad of her thumb over his chin before pulling him in for a soft, sweet kiss. "And, that is what I really want right now...besides you that is, so come here, hmmm?"_

_Her lips caught his with a searing spark of static electricity that ran down his spine as they fell into a deep, grasping kiss, and for a few moments he wondered if he'd ever really be able to say 'no' to her again._

He found himself thinking about about that night in L.A. as their driver carefully navigated through the choking web of Cairo's dense traffic and across the Al-Tahrir Bridge towards Al-Ahrāmāt, the Pyramids, which lay in the desert on the outskirts of the city on the west side of the Nile.

They had just settled into their wide black leather seats within the auditorium when a loud, broad amplified voice filled the flat expanse of desert as a warm orange glow lit up the six pyramids in the distance—the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with the three smaller step-pyramids referred to the as Queen's Pyramids, just south of Menkaure's monument—and the wind-worn features of Great Sphinx. It wasn't completely dark, and a small band of blue hovered along the horizon as the last remnant of evening twilight faded on this, the longest night of the year.

Angel sat back and watched the show, impressed by the sweeping narration, which seemed to match the timeless grandeur of the monuments that it described. The laser light show itself reminded him of a Pink Floyd laser show he saw once at the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, except it was without the faint smell of marijuana smoke wafting through the air. As the brightly-colored lights flickered and swirled over the craggy, weathered face of the Sphinx, he remembered the first time he went to the observatory, decades earlier, long before there was such a thing as Pink Floyd, rock music or laser shows, and how he'd walked out of the place after all the science talk by the astronomer made him miss Brennan's presence even more acutely than he did just minutes before and he left, spending the rest of the show outside in the garden, chain-smoking and staring down at L.A.'s twinkling cityscape below. He blinked away the memory as he felt Brennan's hand slide over the top of his leg and pat the inside of his thigh.

"Hey," he whispered, turning his head and wrapping his arm around her, pulling her close as she nestled her cheek against his shoulder. He felt her hand slide up his inseam and bit down on the inside of his lip as the fleshy outside of her hand brushed up against his groin. "Bren," he groaned, wincing a little at the touch as he heard her snicker quietly. "Come on."

Angel leaned his head back and sighed, grunting softly as he moved his leg, bringing his thighs together as if in so doing he could get her to stop teasing him. Though their hotel, the Mena House Oberoi, was nearby, he knew if she started touching him in earnest, she would have driven him half-mad by the time the laser show was over and they returned to their suite.

He swallowed as he remembered the way they'd come together the night before.

_Angel closed his eyes and arched his head back as he leaned into his hands, trying to get the room to stop spinning around him as the last sparks of blue electricity popped and crackled in the space between their two sweat-slicked bodies. He rocked his hips against her one more time, uttering a muted laugh as he did so, then opened his eyes to see her laid out in flushed, rosy splendor before him as he rolled off of her and took his place by her side. He snaked his arm around her back and pulled her snug against him, turning his head and placing a soft kiss on her sticky forehead. _

"_God, I was an idiot to miss out on this the first time I came to Egypt," he said with a chuckle, raising his eyebrows as he watched Brennan scrunch her nose as she formulated her reply. "If this is what it would have been like...I was a complete fuckin' tool."_

_Laughing at his self-derision, Brennan lifted her heavy-lidded eyes to meet his as she spoke in a sultry tone. "The room wouldn't have looked quite like this," she said, pointing to the hand-carved Arabesque screen that separated the hotel suite's bedroom from the adjoining sitting room. "The rooms at Shepheard's Hotel were more traditionally furnished, in the English style, with a lot of Chippendale chairs, chests of drawers in the Georgian style, and—"_

_Angel snickered at her literalness and pinched her in the side. "I wasn't talking about the furniture, Bren," he said. "I mean..." He pressed his lips together and hugged her closer to him, palming her hip as he felt her fingers fan out over his chest. "I was thinking about what would have happened if I hadn't lost my nerve, you know, and...I mean, would you have wanted me back then?"_

_Brennan took a breath at hearing the uncertainty in his voice, pulling away from him as she sat up and looked at him, stroking her fingers along the line on the edge of his face, in front of his ear and down to the rough, pebbled skin of his jaw. _

"_Angel," she said, her voice firm and low but tinged with a faint sadness. "I've told you before—I've always wanted you. I wanted you when you didn't have a soul, and I've wanted you since you got it back. I don't care who or what you are. I will and always shall love the man you are or any man that you might ever become. Do you understand that?"_

_He smiled and nodded. "I just—I-I was so sure then, you know, that you wouldn't have really wanted me."_

"_You were wrong," she said flatly. "What's done is done, and I know rationally that there's no going back, but Angel, you need to understand that...well, the fact of the matter is you were wrong. Maybe we didn't know it then, but what we had—even then—was always more than what you were or what I was individually." _

_Brennan narrowed her eyes as she replayed her statement in her own mind, then shrugged. "I'm sorry you suffered," she said. "I'm sorry you worried that I wouldn't want you, because nothing is further from the truth." _

_She cocked her head to one side and smiled as she patted his cheek once and resumed her place, curled up against his side with her hand on his sweat-damp chest, drawing her thumb over his nipple with a quiet, curt laugh as she bent her head and kissed his shoulder. _

"_You know I wouldn't have turned you away, right?" she asked him simply. Brennan turned her head slightly and gazed up at him, her pale eyes blinking back at him with an open but grave, expectant look as she watched his jaw shift a couple of times, his eyes narrowing then widening again as he thought about her words. After a few seconds, his expression softened somewhat before his cheeks rose and a smile slowly cracked his face. _

_"I know that's mostly true, lass," he said with a measure of feigned hesitation. "But, don't forget there here was that __one__ time..." _

_Brennan rolled her eyes at him as she shook her head and muttered something under her breath about vampires with big mouths. _

"_Pishh," he snickered. "I heard that, lass." He blew a puff of air, sending a few of the drier strands of her hair flying as he laughed quietly. "And, yeah, okay, I probably deserved it, but still..."_

_Slapping his chest playfully, she laughed and looked up at him, glad to see that the brooding look of vulnerability that had briefly glistened in his warm brown eyes had given way to the twinkling laughter she'd grown to adore over the century and a half of their relationship. _

"_That's damn right," she told him with a slight grin cracking her mock serious facade as she remembered the night she threw him off her London balcony after he came to her stinking of another woman. "You did deserve what you got, Angel. Every little bit and more. But_—"

"_Maybe," he grinned at her as he murmured back with a closed-mouthed grin, reaching up and brushing a few errant locks of her auburn hair off her forehead. "But, we more than made up for it the next time I came to see you, mmm?" He pressed a soft kiss on the top of her head and let his lips linger against her scalp for a minute, then placed his right hand over hers as it rested on his chest. _

"_Maybe," she said, she answered him vaguely. "I think you might have to remind me again, though, what we did."_

_Grinning at her, he tugged at her hand, sliding it down his chest and over his navel with a throaty chuckle as he felt her hand push his away and proceed towards the desired destination. He leaned his head back and swallowed, a sighing moan passing between his lips as he felt her touch send a surge of pleasure racing up his spine._

_"Ohhhh, God..."_

Angel blinked away the pleasurable memory of the night before and tried to bring his focus back to the laser light show's booming narration.

"...as was written by Herodotus, the Father of History..."

He turned and looked at Brennan, for a time zoning out as his gaze focused on her, transfixed by her beauty. A smile curved his lips as he watched her long, square jaw tightened and relaxed again, her pale eyes blinking, narrowing and darting around as her active mind mused—and, he imagined, silently critiqued the factual accuracy of the laser light show's narration—and he placed his hand over hers, threading his thick fingers between her slender ones as he felt the warmth of her palm through the thin summer-weight wool of his slacks.

"The shape of the Pyramids symbolizes many important concepts in the religion of the ancient Egyptians," the melodic voice intoned over the PA system. "They represent the primordial mound from which the ancients believed the world was created. The straight lines of the Pyramids' sides symbolize the rays of the sun and the use of polished limestone on the faces of the structures caused them to reflect the sun's rays brightly. Most of these casement stones fell away from the underlying material over seven hundred years ago, but the outer layer of such stones are still visible at the apex of the Great Pyramid of Khufu—"

The narrative continued as the lights and lasers illuminated the pyramids and the Great Sphinx. A grin broke across Angel's face as he thought how rare it was to encounter things which were older than him and his nearly 500 year-old lover. He had outlived kings and queens, dynasties, revolutions and counterrevolutions, alliances, wars and countries, having seen the rise and fall of entire empires, but these, these amazing structures—including the Great Pyramid itself, the only one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world still standing—were ancient when he was a boy nursing at his mother's tit and these incredible monuments to long-dead pharaohs had outlived them all.

He chuckled silently as he wondered if this was part of why Brennan had been attracted to archaeology and anthropology. Angel had struggled from time to time to find purpose amid his own immortality: an endless future, stretching out forever with no end, could rob a man of focus and motivation. He had known a lot of immortals over the years who never found a purpose, and who either threw themselves into reckless hedonism, murderous hell-raising or—in his case, both. Getting his soul back in 1898 had changed all that.

But for Brennan, what changed her wasn't finding something new inside herself, but discovering something that gave her a place in the world outside of her. In the closing years of the 19th century, she'd gone to the British Museum to pass the time one afternoon and, while wandering the halls of the antiquities section, had discovered a newfound fascination with ancient civilizations and the lives—and bodies—of the people who'd inhabited them. She'd journeyed to Crete, Cyprus, Palestine, and Egypt the following spring, and her life had taken on a new focus after that. Brennan had returned to Egypt the following year, in 1897, and joined her first archaeological expedition at Luxor that year.

The rest, for lack of a better word, was history.

Angel squeezed her hand with a throaty chuckle. Brennan smiled, glancing over her shoulder, admiring the way his olive skin glowed as his dark eyes flickered back at her with what seemed to be quiet amusement. She looked up into the black desert sky and saw that the moon had risen and hung relatively low over the endless horizon.

The way the stars looked in the canopy above reminded her of the way the sky had looked more a hundred years earlier as it hung over a smaller, more colonial Cairo.

_Brennan nibbled at the blueberry scone on her saucer. It was a bit stale, the desert air robbing it—seemingly like everything else in Egypt—of every possible measure of moisture. She swallowed and pursed her lips together as she listened to the _muezzin _call the faithful to prayer from the top of a nearby minaret. His voice sang the _adhan, _the Muslim call to prayer, and she felt a chill run up her spine as the words rang out through the bazaars and dense glut of mud-brick buildings between the hotel and the mosque:_

Ash-hadu al-la ilaha illa llah  
Ash-hadu anna Muħammadu Rasulullah  
Hayya 'ala s-salah…

_The muezzin fell silent and the air became still, and yet the buzz that Brennan felt low in her belly did not abate, and the hair on the back of her neck stood on end, causing her to roll her shoulders at the strong prickling sensation she felt. Something crackled in the air around her—something that Brennan knew was not entirely of this world—and she turned her head, gazing intently into the darkness as she wondered if, after nearly a month of taking her evening tea out on the hotel's grand terrace, he had finally come to her as he'd promised he would. _

_"Angelus?" she said so quietly that she knew no one, perhaps not even a vampire, would be able to hear. _

_When she received no response to her query, Brennan reached for her cup of tea before and sighing and shaking off the strange feeling of d__éjà vu_ that had suddenly come over her. She stared out into the darkness of the Cairo evening for a moment more before returning to her evening paper with a small shake of her head.

Angel blinked away the thought of what he had failed to do the first time he'd come to Cairo to be with her. He turned and looked at her, frowning at the idea that he'd hurt her by leaving as he did, sadly and silently, without a word, leaving her alone and wondering on the terrace of her hotel nearly a hundred and five years before. He hunched over the railing of the balcony of their hotel suite and felt the warmth of her body heat on his boxer-clad hip as she leaned gently against him.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly as they gazed out at the Great Pyramid, bathed in the cool, white light of the waxing midwinter moon. "I'm so sorry, Bren."

Brennan arched an eyebrow and stepped closer to him, pressing her bosom against his broad back as she snaked her arms around his waist.

"Angel," she said. She could hear the dark, sad tone in his voice and she tightened her grasp around him as if by letting him feel the warmth of her embrace she could pull him away from whatever brooding attack he was teetering on the edge of. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" she asked. "The way the moonlight catches the smooth faces of the casement stones..."

He shook his head. "Yeah, but_—_" He stopped and then said, "I can't stop thinking about it, you know? Being here again? I guess I shouldn't be, but I am."

Realizing that he was on the edge of toppling into a full blown downward brooding spiral, Brennan immediately shook her head as she pleaded with him. "Angel," she said quietly. "Please. Don't do that. You know if we were to start going down the path of would'ves, could'ves, and should'ves about the past that we'd never have enough time to live in the present."

Angel hesitated for a minute. "I know, Bren, but I can't help it. I try not to, but...wel, I should've come to you," he said vaguely. He tilted his head to the side and looked at her, pressing his lips together as he felt a faint burning in his nostrils. Although he wasn't sure why it was so important to him in that moment, he felt deeply compelled to tell her that he hadn't abandoned her for lack of desire for her company. He had never not wanted her. He had never not wanted to be with her. He needed her to know that. "I was wrong," he told her. "Bren, I never should've have left you there."

"Don't apologize," she said, placing a whisper-soft kiss against a pockmark on the back of his neck. "Please. Don't."

He reached down and clasped her hands, then turned around, pulling her against his chest as he cupped his big hand over the side of her head. "I just..." He shrugged and blinked away the moisture in his glimmering brown eyes. He glanced at the pyramid in the distance and shook his head. "We wasted so much time," he said quietly. "So much damn time." He paused, then sighed. "I caused you so much pain."

Wrapping her arms more tightly around his waist, she pursed her lips and shrugged. "Don't," she said quietly. "You're here. I'm here. We can't..." Her voice trailed off and she brought her hand up to his upper arm and gently squeezed his firm bicep.

"It's going to be different now," he said, his low, velvety voice thoughtful and edging upward with hope as he slipped from her grasp and turned around to face her. "You know? We're gonna figure this out," he said, his voice a promise as he suddenly felt emboldened by the smile that was spreading across her face at her words. "I'm not quite sure how," he added, his lips pursed as his own growing smile broke through his pout. "But we _will _find a way."

"I know we will," she told him. "It's just a question of us finding equilibrium," Brennan said vaguely as she pressed her body against his and raised her chin to kiss him, a hum sounding in her throat as she let her lips linger against his. Breaking off the kiss, she tilted her head to one side and raised her eyebrows in a gesture of reassurance. "I'm not certain how we'll do it either, but I do know that, eventually, we _will_ figure it out, Angel."

He nodded and swallowed, leaning his forehead against hers. "Even if I can't wake up each and every morning with you," he said, "I'd like to know that, on those mornings I wake up alone, that I can count the weeks until I'll see you again."

She reached up and palmed his smooth, clean-shaven jaw without breaking the contact between their foreheads, stroking her thumb across his high, prominent zygomatic arch. "I think we can find a way to make that happen," she said. "We'll find a way, somehow."

Angel's lip quivered as he considered her words. "We will," he said quietly, smiling faintly and gently squeezing her hip with his hand as he pulled away slightly. He cocked his head to one side and his dark eyes narrowed as he stared at her for several moments, admiring the way her porcelain skin glowed under the light of the nearly-full moon. He couldn't help but smile at how her face seemed to shine with the same kind of timeless beauty as reflected off the sleek casement stones that capped the ancient Great Pyramid in the distance behind him.

"I know," she replied, threading her hand through his thick brown hair, curling her fingers against his scalp as she pulled him in for another kiss. "I don't know many things for certain, but that I do know."

He resisted her pull for a moment, leaning his head back slightly as he watched her pink, slender lips part in anticipation of a grasping kiss. A tiny whimper sounded from her as he grinned back, his white teeth gleaming in the moonlight, then leaned in and pressed his lips to hers.

* * *

**A/N: **_ So there you have it._

_We hope you enjoyed this little interlude in Egypt. Coming up next in the "Compendium" series (although we're not quite sure when, since we're also readying the first part of the 8th in our Angel(us)-Booth arc entitled "A Would-Be Reunion") is a followup to the second lost moment about Angel and Max. This time, Angel gets another unexpected visitor in L.A. The question is who and will he have the same response that he did when it was Max? Stay tuned to find out. _

_Until then, thanks for reading and letting us know what you think. We really love reviews, and we'd really love it if you'd take the time to leave us one :-)_


	6. Revelations

**A Compendium of Lost Moments**

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**By: **dharmamonkey & Lesera128  
**Rated: **T  
**Disclaimer: **_We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own._

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**A/N:** _This installment picks up at the end of "Echoes True and False" (so if you haven't read that yet this will be a bit spoilery) and shows us what happened after Booth and Brennan return from Holy Trinity Church on the morning of All Saints' Day._

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**Chapter 6: Revelations**

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**Washington, D.C. ~ November 1, 2007**

"Booth!" Brennan protested as her partner and, since an hour earlier, her husband, pushed her nearly face-first into her front door. She felt his fingers splayed against the small of her back as she fumbled with the keys.

"I'm sorry," he snickered as he leaned over and kissed the side of her neck. "But I can't help it, lass. Now that we've had lunch and gotten hitched, I suddenly feel like all I wanna do is go inside and fuck you senseless all afternoon and all damn night." Booth laid a kiss behind her ear, letting his lips linger there as he sucked softly on her skin. "Hmm?" His hand cupped her hip and he gave her a gentle squeeze as she finally shoved the key into the lock.

She opened the door with a rough turn of the key, quickly swung the door open and walked in, rolling her eyes as she looked over her shoulder at him and said, "You act as if you haven't gotten laid in the last twenty-four hours, Booth. Which, of course, is far from the case."

"Huh," he grunted as he reached for her again and pulled her towards him, twirling her around to face him as he tilted his head with a dark, lusty-eyed grin and moved in to kiss her. "As soon as Father Keyes pronounced us man and wife, I couldn't wait to get back here so I could feel you again," he said, punctuating his admission with a lick of his lips. "And now, we're here, and I don't wanna wait another second, lass."

"Mmmm," Brennan murmured as her reply was swallowed up in his kiss. She opened her mouth to his kiss and closed her eyes, her chest swelling with feeling and her belly tightening with desire as she felt Booth's eager tongue sweep into her mouth as his lips grasped at hers. Her skin tingled, her cheeks flushing and her ears burning hot as she met his kiss, pulling away to gasp for a few seconds of much-needed breath before his hungry lips sought hers out once more. She reached around with her hands and palmed his ass, slipping her thumbs under the waistband of his gray dress slacks as she jerked his hips flush against hers. "And it's _husband _and wife, Booth," she mumbled into his broad chest. "Not _man _and wife. I am _not _a possession to anyone...including you no matter how much I love you."

"So," he said with a lascivious twinkle in his warm brown eyes and a crooked smirk on his lips. "So ya don't wanna be possessed?" he asked her, a faint growl rumbling in the back of his throat as he felt her body heat against his tightening groin through the thin, sheer material of her wrap-style dress. "Too bad, 'cause I sure was hoping you'd let me take you..."

Booth walked his hand around to the side of Brennan's dress and he rolled the knotted sash between his thumb and forefinger.

"You know, I can't figure out why it took me so long to figure it out," a raspy voice called out from the corner of the living room. Brennan and Booth turned around and saw Max Keenan leaning back in the dark brown, brass-tacked leather chair with his head cocked to one side and a narrow-eyed look on his face.

"Dad," Brennan said, her voice less one of surprise and more of a protest at having an intimate moment in her own home shattered by her father. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

Booth's brows furrowed low and hard over his dark eyes as he looked at his father-in-law. "I thought I arrested you a long time ago," he grunted in a low voice, reaching up and touching his fingers to his cheek at the memory of the fistfight he'd gotten into with the older man on the night he'd arrested him. "Aren't you supposed to be in jail or something, Max?"

"Well," the old warlock said with a smug grin. "Yeah, maybe. But you can't blame me if the guards minding the exercise yard forgot to bring me back in after morning recess. And it's not my fault that they forgot to lock up the side gate after the food supplier's truck came through for its twice-weekly delivery."

Shaking his head, Booth put his hands on his hips and turned to Brennan. "What did he do, Bones?" he asked her.

She raised her eyebrows and shrugged, then looked to her father. "Why are you here, Dad?" she asked him again.

Max Keenan stood up from the old Mexican leather chair and walked over towards his daughter and her partner.

"Dad," Brennan prompted him again. "You broke into my home. _Again_. You're supposed to be in federal lockup, but you're here, sitting in my living room. I think I'm entitled to an explanation."

Max rocked on the balls of his feet for a few seconds and then shot a look from Brennan to Booth to Brennan again. At last, he answered, "Well, you know, baby girl. The damnedest thing happened yesterday. There I was in my cell, just after lights out, getting all drowsy with a smile on my handsome mug when I was in my bunk thinking about this upcoming conjugal visit Steph was going to―"

Booth rolled his eyes. "You know what, Max?" he said. "I don't really wanna hear about whatever tricks you have planned for your lady love when she comes to visit you in the hoosegow. TMI, okay? I'm just not interested."

Snapping his head to look at Booth, Max scowled, "I wasn't talking to _you_." He punctuated his statement with a sharp jab of his index finger in the air in Booth's general direction. "I was talking to Tempe."

"Yeah," Booth said. "Well, I don't think Bones wants to hear about your plans in that regard either, okay? In fact, I'm pretty damn sure that she would just as soon your private love life stay that way―private." He quirked an eyebrow and gave his partner a quick glance, then turned back to the old warlock. "So, do you need a ride back to the Federal Correctional Institution at Cumberland? 'Cause I'd be happy to make arrangements for you if―"

In response to Booth's question, a truly nasty twitch of Max's mouth turned his scowl into a full blown snarl. Narrowing his piercing blue eyes, he suddenly snapped, "God, what I wouldn't give for a sharp piece of wood right now if only I didn't know that it wouldn't make you turn into a happy pile of fireplace ash when I shoved it in your miserable heart."

The agent's jaw hardened as he heard his longtime lover's father speak of his demonic past. "What?" he coughed. "What are you talking about?" he asked, looking again to Brennan as some of the color drained from his olive-skinned face at hearing the secret of his secret past―which had been a secret unknown even to him until just a few hours earlier―laid bare by another person. His eyes narrowed as he remembered seeing Brennan's father, perhaps a few pounds lighter, but otherwise much the same in appearance, with his thick head of dirty blond hair and bright blue eyes, standing in the lobby of a finely-appointed London hotel giving him much the same kind of dark, hateful glare that bore into him as he stood in Brennan's living room.

His head bouncing in an almost imperceptible circle, Max sneered, "Like I was trying to tell Tempe, I was in bed last night, just after lights-out, when the damnedest thing happened. I was thinking of Steph one minute, and the next minute, I was thinking of Russ and Tempe...and then _you_." He paused for a moment, his mouth twisting as if he'd tasted something foul, before he continued. "Imagine my surprise when all of a sudden I realized that the flat-footed tightwad who Tempe's been partnered with for the last three years is actually the same Fenian pain in my ass that I haven't been able to get rid of for the last century-plus. You can imagine my surprise when I recalled this pertinent little detail, but more importantly I couldn't figure out why I just suddenly remembered it." Max's hard look softened as he turned to Brennan and said, "I knew something must be up, baby girl, that's why I thought it might be time for a visit to see if you needed me."

Brennan was quiet for a few seconds and then said in an unusually soft voice, "A lot's happened in the last twenty-four hours, Dad, but I'm okay."

Tilting his head at Brennan, he studied her for a minute and then spun on his heels to look at Booth. "What did you do to her now, you formerly Fenian bloodsucker?"

Booth shook his head and grunted, then took a couple of steps towards his new father-in-law. "Why do you assume it's _me _who's done something to _her, _huh?" he grunted. "So now I'm not just the asshole cop who threw your sorry ass in jail, but now I'm the asshole mick you don't like messing with your daughter?"

Nodding, Max snapped, "If the shamrock fits, buddy. If the shamrock friggin' fits."

"Aye?" Booth retorted with a sneer of his own. "Well, you know what? Fuck you, Max. I've never done anything to hurt her. And I'm not about to start." He leveled a hard stare at the old warlock, then shook his head again and spat, "You're just like you always were, huh? You think you're awfully damn smart. Well, you know what? I'm not just some dumb mick right off the boat, mmkay? I never was. And I sure the hell ain't now." Booth let the comment hang in the air for a few seconds, then shrugged and said, "So, how about me getting you a ride back to your medium-security hotel?"

Shaking his head, Max grunted, almost to himself, "I knew there was a reason it felt so goddamn good when I slugged you in the balls. Now I just wished I'd done it harder when I had the chance."

"Well, I hate to disappoint you, Max," Booth said with a lewd smirk. "But the equipment still works. Pretty well, in fact. But then again, I suppose I really should leave the whole matter of the equipment be, shouldn't I? Still sort of a sore subject with you, isn't it, even after all these years?"

Clenching both of his hands into tight fists by his side, Max flushed a bright red as he said, "What the hell does that mean?"

Booth snorted. "Do I have to draw you a picture, Max?" he asked. "You know who I'm talking about." He paused reflectively for a moment and grinned. "She said that you weren't as 'well-equipped' as me, but she did note that you were—how exactly did Helen put it?—well, 'more than serviceable.' I guess that was her way of saying you got the job done."

Max's eyes flashed dangerously as he snarled, "Okay, kid. That's it. There's no way in hell I'm gonna take shit from a two-bit, potato-munching derelict like you who got his fangs clipped and put in a jar somewhere on someone's mantel. I mean, I've got wallets and wristwatches older than you, kid, so I'm done taking your shit. So how's about, for once, you put your moves where your big fat mouth is?"

"What's that mean, Mr. Wizard?" Booth replied. "You gonna punch me in the nuts again, or are you gonna whip out your magic wand?"

"Yeah," Max nodded. "That's exactly what it means. I'm gonna stomp your nuts once and for all this time and teach you some manners."

"Bring it," the agent and ex-vampire spat. "I may not be keen on ripping your throat out the way I used to, but that doesn't mean I can't kick your pixie-dust little ass. Let's do it, so that way I can get you back to the clink in Cumberland in time for supper. I heard it's your favorite. Tuna noodle casserole with green peas. Tastes real good eaten off of gray plastic trays with plastic forks." Booth snickered and turned to Brennan, flashed his eyebrows, then turned back to Max and said, "Because my wife makes a great lasagne and I sure the hell don't wanna miss that."

Rolling his eyes, Max guffawed, "Oh, don't tell me I owe you belated congratulations, Booth. Tell me, what tragically poor tart did you knock up now, huh? You actually manage to get one to say 'yes' to you this time when the pee stick turned positive?"

Booth raised his eyebrows and looked to Brennan, watching her deeply annoyed, heavy-lidded expression for a moment before turning back to her father. "Well," he said with a toothy grin. "I gotta give you credit, Max. If I'd called Bones a 'tragically poor tart' I'm pretty sure she'd kick my fuckin' ass from here to Tuesday. So props to you on that."

Max's blue eyes widened as he swallowed heavily and then narrowed his eyes and snapped, "You fucking son-of-a-bitch—you got my baby girl in trouble?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Max," Booth said with a snort. "I didn't know her in the Biblical sense until last night, so I think you're a bit off the mark there, pal. But, in case you're wondering, setting aside any peeing on sticks, she did say 'yes' and thanks to a bit of good work by the good ol' Father at Holy Trinity, we're legal. Totally kosher. We didn't have time to register at Bed Bath & Beyond or anything. But that's okay. Bren doesn't need her daddy buying her salad bowls or a mixer. She'd done pretty well without help these last four hundred-odd years. Especially well without yours, Daddy-O. So no worries, we're good here. I'm serious about the ride back to Maryland, though. I mean, hey, the federal pen ain't the Tower of London, but I figure it's cozy enough for an old codger like you. So, how about it, Pops?" Booth paused and then smirked as he added, "I hope it's okay with you that I don't call you, 'Dad.' Somehow I don't think that is gonna work for me. And 'Pops' is better than what I'd really like to call you. And I figure you don't want me calling you 'Da' either."

Shaking his head, Max's eyes darted over to meet Brennan's, and for a moment they looked at one another, his eyes narrowing then widening again as he saw the wordless warning in his eldest child's rigid gaze. He took a breath and nodded, shrugging faintly before he turned back to Booth.

"No," he said with a snort. "I think I could do without that, kid, seeing as how we all know how you like to handle your paternal relationships. Rip, suck, and drain, wasn't it?" He paused for a minute before he added, "Of course, what you probably didn't know at the time was the fact that you were doing your old man a favor putting him out of his misery given how friggin' disappointed he must've been to have a two-bit fuck-up like you for a son when all it took to be a good man in the 1700s was to stand on your own two feet and not be afraid of your own shadow, you lazy, drunken tosser."

Booth's jaw shifted from one side to the other as he glared at his adversary and father-in-law. "Look, I'll admit it," he said after a minute, his voice suddenly dark and more serious. "I wasn't a great son. I was a prodigal, a shame to my father's name. I'll admit that." He paused, turned and looked at Brennan for several long seconds before turning back to her father. "But I'll tell you one thing that's for sure—I'll do a hell of a lot better job of keeping my wife safe and happy than you ever did since I'm not playing 'Let's Make A Deal' with the Prince of Darkness, huh?"

Max's lower jaw shifted forward in the fraction of a second after Booth's biting quip fell from the agent's lips. The old warlock grunted angrily and lunged at the younger man, diving forward and tackling him to the ground and straddling him.

"You stupid, sniveling asshole," he snarled as he reared his arm back and punched Booth in the mouth, wincing as his knuckles made contact with his son-in-law's teeth.

He leaned back on his haunches and drew his arm back for another blow when Booth spied the opportunity to seize the momentum. Jerking his hips up and knocking the smaller, older man off-balance, Booth rolled them over and in a matter of seconds found himself staring down into Max Keenan's smoldering eyes.

"You know a lot less about me than you think," Booth said, wiping the blood from his busted lip with the back of his hand. He felt Max struggling beneath him and the movement irritated him, drawing a growl from his throat as he leaned forward, pinning Max to the floor as he drew his fist back and slugged the old warlock in the nose.

"You dumb bastard," Max called out. "What're you trying to do—break my nose?"

Booth laughed. "Tryin'," he said with a lopsided grin as he wiped another dribbling thumbful of blood off his lower lip. "We ignorant, potato-munching Fenians aren't good for much, but we're sure good at fighting, aye?"

"You fucking piece of..." Max narrowed his pale eyes and began to mumble unintelligible syllables that fell from his slowly-moving lips with little more than a murmur.

"Enough," Brennan suddenly snapped as her hands closed around her partner's muscular shoulders and she pulled him off of her father. Booth stumbled to his feet, wiping the blood that oozed from his lacerated lip and staring at the blood on his fingers. "I mean it. Right now. Stop it. Both of you. I've had enough."

"He started it," Booth told her weakly, his forehead creased as he looked to her for sympathy but found nothing but tired annoyance and a flicker of disappointment in her shimmering blue eyes.

"Both of you are acting like immature and childish pricks," she said tersely. Turning to her father, who had pushed himself into a sitting position as he continued to mumble under his breath, reaching up with one hand to wipe away the blood that was steadily seeping from his battered nose, she said, "And you—stop that right now."

"What?" he huffed, the blood that was filling his nostrils giving his voice a nasal tone.

"Don't think I don't know exactly what you're trying to do, Dad," she sighed at him. "There will be _no _hexing family members," she declared, pursing her lips as she scanned his face, arching a knowing brow as she leveled a withering stare that made her father suck in a breath of pause. "Not now and not ever. Got it?"

Max Keenan's murmuring lips stilled and his expression turned rigid. After a few long seconds of silence, he grumbled, "He's not family."

Brennan's eyebrows flew up in disdainful surprise. "He is now," she said flatly, the corners of her lips curving upwards as she saw the realization slowly dawn on her father, whose gray-blue eyes blinked and fluttered as he seemed to struggle with processing her words. The gravity of the revelation seemed to slacken the features of his weathered face.

"Booth is my husband," she explained. "He and I are a family now which means that, by extension, he's part of your family now. And there will be no hexing of family members, Dad, unless you want to deal with _me_...and I don't think that's something that either one of us wants." Her bright blue eyes locked with her father's and held fast. "Do you understand?"

Max didn't reply but sighed as he struggled to his feet, sniffling as he wiped his nose with the palm of his hand. "Why did you do this?" he asked her with a frown. "Why, Tempe?"

The last vestiges of tired indifference faded from Brennan's square-jawed face. "I don't owe you an explanation, Dad," she said. "It's frankly none of your business."

"But, Tempe," Max protested. "Baby, you—"

Brennan shook her head and cut her father off mid-sentence. "Booth is my husband," she said. "I _love_ him. I want to make a life with him. He makes me happy. I don't expect you to understand that, but if you love me and want what makes me happy like you say you do, then I do expect to you respect it because he's all that matters to me, Dad."

"But, Tempe," he said, looking over at Booth, unable to shake from his mind the image of his soulless incarnation falling to the ground after being shoved off Brennan's Cheapside balcony. "You know I just want what's best for you, but are you sure this is it? That _he's_ the best for you? Because I really don't think—"

"It's none of your concern, Dad," she maintained with a sharp cluck of her tongue. "It's _my _life."

Max's nostrils flared angrily at her words and ruddy face flushed even more deeply as he lunged at Booth again.

"You son of a bitch," he said as he shoved Booth, causing the latter to stumble backwards a little. "You don't deserve her. You didn't then, and you don't now. You _never _did."

Booth's lip curled back with anger as he stood there and Max's insult smoldered hot and dark in the recesses of his roiling mind. His whole body tensed, tight as a coiled spring, until he couldn't take it any more and finally reached out, grabbing his new father-in-law by the shirt and giving the old man a harder shove than Max had given him.

"It's _not _your call, Max," he told him, stepping back even as the warlock took two steps forward and drew his arm back to ready a punch.

"I told ya, kid," Max growled back, swinging at Booth's chin but missing as the younger man leaned back and dodged the blow at the last second. "She's outta your league and—"

Booth was about to return the punch when the air between them suddenly crackled with an electric charge that made the hair on their arms stand on end. The air flashed brightly, filling their eyes with a swirl of indigo as a lariat-like tendril of energy snaked around their respective waists and jerked them apart. Shocked by the unexpected burst of magic, both men turned and stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at Brennan, whose normally porcelain skin had blushed to a light pink as her eyes flashed a bright shade of azure. Booth found his own skin flushing as his gut tightened at the sight of her, resplendent in a way he had seldom seen her outside of the bedroom. Max Keenan's stunned look gave way to a proud smile and a twinkle in his eye as he watched the sparks crackle in the space between her splayed fingers.

"Enough," Brennan said, glaring at them for a minute before she snapped her fingers and released the two men from their bindings.

Booth gave her a pleading look and stammered, "Bones, I—"

"I don't want to hear it," she said, the exhausting effect of the magic plain in her voice as she sighed at the two men standing before her. "This little pissing contest of yours is ludicrous. You know, the two of you should just go over there to the dining room table, whip your respective dicks out and just measure them once and for all, and finally be done with it." Giving each of them an eye roll and a disapproving glare, she smirked and added, "In a completely non-homoerotic way, of course."

Booth blushed and swallowed uncomfortably. "I-I, uhhh..."

"You should know better, Booth," she sighed. Turning to Max, she narrowed her sparkling blue eyes and said, "And _you, _using a pair of memory charms to slink your way out of federal lockup. _Tsk tsk. _Very naughty..."

Then she rolled her eyes at both of them and wearily walked into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, muttering about the joys of family life as she went.

* * *

A/N: _So there you are._

_Yes, when we merged the Bonesverse and Angelverse into a single wacky world, it gave us all kinds of new and fun ways to play on the existing tension between the characters. The prickly Max/AngelBooth vibe in the Dharmasera crossover-verse is just too juicy to resist. _

_So, what did you think of that one? We've got several more of these in our queue that we'll be sharing as time goes on. And we're working on getting the first installment of the 8th crossover story, "A Would-Be Reunion," ready for prime time. _

_Until then, thanks for reading and letting us know what you think. We really love reviews, and we'd really love it if you'd take the time to leave us one :-)_


	7. Caged

**A Compendium of Lost Moments**

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**By: **dharmamonkey  
**Rated: **M  
**Disclaimer: **_We're still waiting for that special envelope to come in the mail announcing that the creators of the Bonesverse and Angelverse have signed over their rights to us, but alas, all we seem to find when we check the Dharmasera mailbox are Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, Lands End catalogs and bills from our cell phone providers saying they're losing money on our unlimited data plans. We don't own jack. But we sure do rock what other people own._

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**A/N:** _This one-shot is set at the beginning of Angel episode 4x11 -"Soulless." Angel's soul has been extracted by a mystic, unleashing Angelus. Confined to a cage in the basement of the Hyperion, Angelus reflects on his newfound freedom and on the one thing he most wants to find now that he's been cut loose from the prison of Angel's ensoulment._

**UNF Alert: **_A bit of a spoiler to have to give you one here, but it's necessary. You see, all good things must come to an end, and in this case, that means the T-rating for this "Compendium" series. The content rating is a slave to our muse and our muse finally said enough with the T rating. Who are we to argue? What follows is M-rated. _

_In case you didn't take the hint above, this oneshot is told from the point of view of Angelus. If you know Angelus (and we're pretty sure you all do), then you know that Angelus is a walking libido whose thirst for human blood is (possibly) exceeded only by his insatiable sex drive_—_although we aren't quite 100% certain on that last point. What follows is definitely of an adult nature. If you don't like reading that stuff, or your mom and dad would have aneurysms if they knew you were reading this stuff because it's naughty, and you aren't of an appropriate legal age where you should be reading this, then please do us all a favor and turn away now. For the rest of you, Angelus awaits._

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**Chapter 7: "Caged"**

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**Los Angeles, California ~ February 4, 2003**

You know, it's pretty fucking ironic.

No sooner do I finally rid myself of the sniveling pussy that I've been since I got saddled with that fucking soul that I've been carrying around for more than a century—with all of its namby-pamby conscience and prevarication that's like a goddamned pair of cement shoes holding me down when I could've been out raising all kinds of epic hell—then I find myself stuck in this fucking cage in a dimly lit basement, waiting for those stupid wussies upstairs to decide what they want to do with me.

I'm not a fucking idiot...even if they think I am.

I see the closed-circuit TV cameras. I know they're watching me. Probably listening to me, too. Maybe I should unzip my pants and whip it out, right in front of the camera, then rub one out for 'em so they can all watch in full surround sound like a little one-man porn show. Lorne'd probably like that. Wesley's kind of a pouf, too. I bet he'd love to see what I've been packing all this time. I look at the camera one more time and decide, at least for now, to keep it in my pants. Maybe one of the girls will come down and I can see about having one—or, hell, maybe both of them—open wide and suck me off. They both have pretty nice mouths.

I have a pretty good hunch that Cordy's sucked a lot of cock. Well, actually, for all her trying-break-into-Hollywood-by-going-to-parties nonsense, I bet there's not a C-list director or producer on this side of Santa Monica Boulevard whose slimy prick she _hasn't _sucked. So, she'd have to be pretty good at it. Besides, she does have nice tits. They're not great, but they're something to grab onto and play with while I'm fucking her face so it wouldn't be a completely waste of five or ten minutes of my time.

Maybe they'll send Fred down to service my needs. I'm no fool. Even before I got my recent soul-ectomy (thank you very much, creepy, slant-eyed shaman), I was listening at night when she and her black Orpheus go at it in bed. She seems all quiet, bookish and demure, innocent and cool to the touch, but I've heard the way she screams when Gunn's pounding into her. I'd bet good money, cash on the barrel, that it's not just him—you know, that ol' Fred ain't the prim little schoolgirl she holds herself out to be. She's a naughty little librarian. That wee wisp of a woman can fuck. I'm sure of it.

It's always the bookish types with the brains, great boobs and the piercing eyes—the kind that seems tame enough from a distance but once you get between those sweet little legs of hers, you find out that you're tumbling a tigress. I learned that lesson a century and a half ago when I took that witch for being just a quirky broad with a bag of sparkly magic tricks. And what a lesson it was. She was a hell of a lot more than that.

_Unf_. Just thinking about _her_ makes me hard. Shit. I'm so fucking horny right now thinking about the witch that I'd do either of the silly sluts upstairs just to take the fucking edge off.

But with my luck, my next visitor is gonna slink down those stairs sporting a cock and two balls.

And I know someone's gonna come to check on me. Because every once in awhile, one of them will come down here, look at me with one of those beady, narrow-eyed little stares that I guess they think is supposed to intimidate me—_me, _Angelus, the Scourge of fucking Europe—and make me think twice about trying something.

But for the better part of a day, they've pretty much just let me be. They're up there, watching. Trying to figure out what to do with me. Fuckers. If it were me up there, it wouldn't take me two goddamn seconds to make my decision. I'd come down here and fucking drive a stake through my shriveled up heart and dust me in the blink of an eye because unlike some, I know how to pull the fucking trigger and shoot. But no...not them. There a bunch of damn numbnuts, the whole lot of 'em.

It's fucking boring here. But no fucking wonder, huh? The whole wad of them up there are all a bunch of stupid, insipid twats, thinking they can hem me in with a ten by twelve cage of reinforced steel. I don't know what these people think I'm gonna tell them. It's not like they could make me tell them what they want to know. Not a single one of them has the balls to do what would have to be done to get me to sing like a canary like Holtz used to...damn, that was fun. He was a pain in the ass, but I do miss his bloodlust at time. And it's not like they could bribe me into telling them. There's not a fucking thing I want from any of them. But torturing me or bribing me for info hasn't even crossed their small, warped minds. They think they can actually guilt me into telling them what they want to know. Ha! Like I'd do them a fucking favor. Hell will freeze over before I lift a damn finger to help these pig fuckers.

My stomach growls and reminds me how fucking hungry I am. I wonder how long they're gonna leave me down here before they feel sorry for me and bring me a little pig's blood cocktail.

_Pig's blood_.

Jesus Christ...I am so fucking sick of pig's blood. I mean, there's no better symbol of my pansy-ass ensouled counterpart's utter lameness than the fact that he's been living in denial for a hundred-odd years, living off the nasty swill of animal blood rather than the fine champagne of human blood. I mean, why screw around with that shit when you can get out there, find some nice, plump young girl, seventeen or eighteen tops? The most important part is that she's a virgin who's corruptible enough that you can seduce her without her getting scared—'cause if she's scared, she won't come when you fuck her, and if she doesn't come, you won't get to taste how sweet and smooth that blood of hers gets when she's right on the edge of orgasm. That's the good stuff. Some vamps have a preference for blood type, but I don't give two shits if I'm draining a young virgin dry. O-positive, O-negative...or any other type. It doesn't really matter, it's all ambrosia as long as the glass I'm drinking from is young, nubile, and has just came so hard she's shaking. On the other hand, if you're going to opt for the vampire equivalent of drinking boxed wine, pig's blood is undoubtedly the way to go, but why bother? You miss out on the fucking _and_ the good-tasting blood.

Angel and his pig's blood. So pointless and so..._ick_...nasty. Just so fucking nasty.

_Uggggh_.

I heard a human once try to explain to another human the difference between the taste of skim milk and whole milk. "Skim milk tastes like white water," the guy told the girl standing next to him in the line at the movies. Pig's blood is more or less the same thing. It's red, and I guess it sort of smells like the real thing to a human, and it drains out of the veins of a mammal. But from a taste standpoint, it's shit. Utter shit. And the way it feels going down? Not at all the same. Honest to goodness human blood warms the gullet on its way down and tingles a little on the tongue, like a nice glass of Dom Perignon.

It figures, though, right? Angel wouldn't know the good stuff if you jerked his friggin' head back and poured it down his wimpy-ass throat. So it should be no surprise that the douchetastic jack-off doesn't know good fucking, either. He gets some, from time to time, when he decides to bust out of his Dominican friar routine and polish his dick with something besides the calloused palm of his own hand, but even when he does, he goes about it like a lovesick fifteen year-old, stuttering and stumbling around like a fucking douche as opposed to a real man...

"_Oh, Buffy, maybe we shouldn't..."_

Fuck me. Yeah, maybe you shouldn't. How's about this, bitch? Maybe you should grow a damn set and show the girl what a real fuck feels like. For fuck's sake. Even when he had another run at the Slayer, on that one little day when he was human again—I mean, granted, the boy did manage to hit for the cycle a couple of times before he waxed all goody-two-shoes and went to the mystic wish-a-weenies to ask to turn the clock back so he could save the world—but still, he did her like she was made of _paper-mâché_instead of a fuckable, suckable, cum-swallowing specimen of womanflesh. What a limp-dicked moron. I'm surprised he could even get hard enough to stick it in somebody.

Then there's Cordy.

"_Must be hard," _she told him. _"Seeing everyone so happy because of what you did. Bringing the light back, but not being able to go out into it."_

"_There's no place I'd rather be than here with you,"_ he said to her. Ol' Angelcakes must've been reading too many of that pansy Lorne's gay Harlequin romance novels. Give me a fucking break. Or, better yet, give me a break so we can actually get some real fucking.

"_No," _she replied. _"Whatever it is, whatever the reason or excuse or logic, we're here. Now. Together. Everything is the way it's supposed to be. For once. Angel, haven't we waited long enough?"_

Pardon me while I vomit.

So he finally gets his shot with her and he pulls the same limp-dicked romantic, gag me with one of those sugar crystal stirrers that you get with a cappuccino routine. Delicate little lip-kisses, breathy sighs, low moans and slow strokes. Are you freakin' kiddin' me? Jesus H. Christ, you twat. Fucking isn't a massage. There should be no sighing, ooh'ing or ahh'ing, okay? Screaming and grunting? Abso-fucking-lutely. That's not just recommended, it's mandatory. But let me give you a hint, in case you were wondering. Sighing is not the sound of fucking. If you don't leave bruises or bitemarks, it's not a good fuck. It's not even a mediocre one. Fact is, it's not fucking at all.

No wonder my limp-dicked _doppelgänger _is always brooding and sulking. He gets laid, what? Once every year or two? Maybe more often, but averaging in all of his self-imposed droughts, the numb-nut gets laid so infrequently I'm surprised he hasn't been elected to the College of Cardinals.

Which probably explains why my balls hurt so bad right now I can barely think straight. I mean, my twinkle-toed counterpart has been getting by on wanking off in the shower every other day and getting laid once in a blue moon. At least he manages to show good taste in women from time to time, when he decides to come out of his monk-y little cell and get some, even though it has been a while. Too damn long since he got a good solid fuck from the one woman left on earth who can deliver it. I can feel my dick getting hard just thinking about her.

See, I've fucked a lot of women in the last 250-plus years. A _lot _of women. I am not even sure how many. As I lean back against the cold brick wall of my basement cell, I'm trying to think through the math. (I was never really good with arithmetic. So sue me.)

Let's see...

150 years times 365 days (assuming I fucked one woman a day) is, what? 50,000 or something? Whatever. I'm too tired, hungry and horny to focus on doing the math. It's a big fucking number. Point is, I've fucked a lot of women—several tens of thousands of 'em—and only two of 'em really knew how to fuck the way I wanted to fuck.

Darla, of course. She really knew how to fuck. She'd starting fucking professionally almost 150 years before she met me, and she was good. Darla could ride a stiff dick all damn night long and milk that fucking cock with her pussy like she was squeezing it in her fist. She had great tits—not particularly big, though they were quite a bit bigger than the two little fried eggs pasted to the front of that stupid Slayer's chest, but they were nice and firm—and her nipples were big and rosy, round and soft at first but got wonderfully tight and hard once she got worked up. She could fuck all day and night, and she was always up for mixing it up, letting me take her every which way I could and then letting me come in her mouth when I was done. That fucking vamp could suck dick like it was going out of style. She took me in all the way, deep-throat, leaving lipstick smears on my ballsack every damn time. That's the sign of a wickedly good cocksucker, lemme tell you. And Darla loved swallowing my come. She used to say it reminded her of the taste of my blood. I always wondered if she turned me because she wanted to taste my come, and once she made me, I was hers and so she got to taste my come as often as she wanted to.

That is, until I met the woman who could fuck even harder and better than Darla. Once I had her, no other fuck was ever the same. Because as good a fuck as Darla ever was, she never had anything on that crazy witch friend of hers, Brennan.

What did Angel call her? "Bren." Aww, isn't that sweet?

Give me a goddamn break. It makes me sick, actually, to think how soft she's become over the years. The woman who, the first night we were together, fileted two hired thugs because they insulted her, is now a goddamned college professor moonlighting as a forensic anthropologist. Pathetic. She's a shadow of her former self. Where's the smoldering rage, the righteous indignation, the thirst for power and the arrogant sense of entitlement that made her a world-class piece of work in her own right and a fucking hellion between the sheets? Angel seems to have damn near neutered her, letting her hang up her pretty silver dagger 'til it's damn near black from tarnish. I can only hope that her fucking skills survived even though her fighting spirit seems to have given up the ghost round about the time Angel's woe-is-me self showed up in Chicago.

_Huh_.

I think about that for a minute. As blue as these balls of mine are right now, it'd be pretty hot to go out for a wee bit of hunting and bring her along—to see if she still has that wicked well of darkness inside of her the way she used to before we go back to her place and fuck that snug pussy and tight ass of hers senseless until that husky, sexy-as-hell voice of hers is little more than a breathy rasp from all the screamin' and moanin' I've reduced her to. I shudder at the thought. As much as I wanna fuck her brains out, I'd love to see her kill again, too, and give into the beautiful darkness that inside of her. She's so fuckably sexy when she does.

Holy sweet and utter hell, if there's a pool of bubbling black left in Hades, please let that woman's epic fucking skills have remained intact despite soulboy's lame handling of affairs these last hundred years.

Sitting here in this cell, just thinking about fucking that witch makes me nearly crawl out of my own skin with want. She can fuck. Tight as the tightest virgin I ever took—and I've fucked a lot of virgins over the years—and spirited. Darla was up for almost anything, but after the first half-century or so, she sort of started to bore me a little. Hell, that's part of why I took to looking for someone else to play with, just to keep from getting too bored with my sire. And Dru is sort of interesting, and sexy in her own mad-as-a-hatter kind of way. She's not a horrible fuck, but the fact of the matter, there's no woman in the world who can fuck the way Temperance Brennan does. The simple fact is there never has been and probably never will be. Maybe it's because she knows how to deal with demons without intimidation or fear. Maybe it's because of her magicks, she understands the threads that hold together the experience of things in the spaces most people can't see. It's not just me. The woman's bargained singlehandedly with The One and, at least up until now, managed to keep the upper hand without getting crushed. Soulboy on the other hand, went the holy fucking martyr route and let The One spend a hundred years breaking his kneecaps and flaying him alive, all to save his lady love from losing the hissing sliver of her soul he's been letting hitchhike through his lame non-life with him.

I can feel it, inside of me—that little hum, the faint little murmur warbling in the back of my head telling me what to do. Hearing that voice, that little voice of hers inside of me, makes me feel a little naked, as if I'm missing something, and I know exactly what I'm missing.

_Her. _My beautiful fucking sexy dark witch. _Her._

Jesus-fuckin'-Christ, I want her.

I lean back against the wall again and slide down until I'm sitting on the concrete floor. Arching my head back, I sigh a little as I remember the last time I fucked her—and by _I_, I mean _me, _not that nitwit, Angel—before Darla, me, Spike and Dru left for Romania. That last night, we fucked like maniacs, six or seven times. That was always one of the things about Brennan I've admired. She's a human, theoretically saddled with all the same frailties and limitations that come with humanity, but because she's gifted the way she is and immortal despite her humanity, she fucks a lot more like a vamp than she does like a normal woman.

And, even more than any vamp woman I've ever fucked, Brennan's insatiable. I'd just barely unloaded into her when she rolled onto her back and started stroking me up again, and after a minute or two, she climbed back on top of me and started to ride me again, the insides of her thighs slick with the come that had dribbled out of her from the last few times we'd fucked. She's got no shame—shame is another one of the markers of human weakness that I've always found hilarious to watch in motion—and so she rode me like an unbroken stallion as I bucked hard against her. As she wound her way towards another shattering release, she threw that beautiful head of hers back and moaned, filling that house with the sound of our fucking so that the neighbors surely knew that somebody was getting reamed on the other side of those thick wattle and daub walls. And when she finally came, she hollered "Holy fucking hell, fuck me harder, Angelus!" at the top of her lungs as I jerked my hips up, slamming up into her a few more times, burying myself balls-deep into her tight, cum-soaked little snatch before I shot my hot load up into her again. We were a glorious mess, our arms and chests covered with sweat while our thighs (the insides of hers, the outsides of mine) were tacky with layers of half-dried come.

Damn, she was good.

She always liked to tell me with a wink and a nod and a flash of those witchy blue eyes of hers how she was very experienced in the sexual arts. I bet another hundred years of experience and scholarship—the woman actually had books on her shelf, actual _books_, about fucking, with pictures and everything showing all the different ways you can fuck—has made her an even better fuck than she was the last time I fucked her, my way, a hundred-odd years ago. I mean, sure, she's fucked Angel pretty good, but he's never matched her the way I did, challenged her the way I did, pushed her all the way to the edge of her physical limits the way I did. It's high fucking time to see if that witch can still fuck the way she used to. I bet she can. And I'm pretty damn sure if given the opportunity, she will. Again and again, I think with a ball-hitching smirk.

Because the thing is, even more than how tight she is or how creative she is, what made Brennan the fuck of the century was the way she pushed me back, the way she challenged me. I've fucked a lot of human women, and I'll be the first to admit that my balls definitely get a little tighter when I smell that tangy, citrusy scent of human fear wafting through my nose. But I knew, that very first night in her home, when she strung me up from her rafters like an eight-point Irish stag, that this was no ordinary woman. That witch looked me straight in the face with those bright blue eyes of hers and I took a whiff, but didn't smell the slightest hint of fear. She wasn't frightened by me. Not a single bit. I smelled not a speck of fear on her. But I could smell the hint of sugar and spice on her, like a bakery almost, but the longer she stood there, the more the spice stood out from the sweetness—which told me something right there about her, huh?—and the angrier she got as I kept needling her with my cocky attitude, the more my nostrils filled with the zing of cinnamon, clove and cardamom. And then, there was a point when I picked up on something more than her sassy attitude and the way those gorgeous tits of hers looked in that red dress with its push-up bodice. She wanted it. She wanted me. And smelling that want—the musky, earthy smell of her getting hot and that curvy yet lithe and totally made-for-fucking body of hers getting slick and sticky in anticipation of feeling my hard, thick cock spearing into her—was like sipping absinthe: sweet, utterly intoxicating, and downright addictive.

And I'd fucked her again and again that night, and by the time the sun came up the next morning, I knew I was done for. No other woman would ever excite me the way she did. I was bewitched, in the best and most decadent way.

Ohh, what I'd do to be able to fuck that witch again. What I'm gonna do...somehow, when I get the fuck out of here. But right now...no...that's not happening right now, is it?

Which means these gut-tugging, belly-sore, long-aching blue bells of mine are gonna shrivel up and fall into horny fucking oblivion before any of these nitwits figure out what to do with me now that they've managed to stick me in a stupid-ass cage in the basement of a defunct wannabe luxury hotel in East Hollywood. The douchebags upstairs want me to help them find and defeat The Beast so they can bring the sun back.

Fuck that shit. Sunlight sucks. The thought occurs to me that this is a pretty awesome little coinkydink, me getting cut loose after far too damn long shackled up, and the sun being in a state of permanent eclipse. That piece of shit airport LAX is closed. Fuck it. I always hated flying anyway. No big deal. I just need to steal me a fast car—a 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS sounds real good to me as I'm thinking about it—then hop on Interstate 10 and motor my way east to Chicago. I bet I can do it in less than twenty-four hours—pavement time, of course, not counting breaks to deal with that nasty sunshine shit outside of L.A.. Reminds me of that movie _Vanishing Point, _where that ex-cop drives a Dodge Challenger R/T 440 Magnum from Denver to San Francisco in less than twenty-four hours. If I can land me a good American muscle car and average 90 mph (I do have to cross the Rockies, after all), I can do it in a couple of days. Only thing better, I think with a smug grin, would be if that jackass The Beast had done it right and given the lovely little blackout a bit bigger scope. Then I really could do it in a day: a day's worth of endless night. But hell, in any case, in two days, I can be outta this shithole and livin' it up in Chicago.

I haven't had a good fuck in who the hell knows how long, and I don't think I can last much longer. But if I can find that wicked witch—and I know I can—then it won't be long before this fucking case of blue balls is just a distant, faint memory.

If I can just get the fuck out of this damn cage.

* * *

**A/N2: **_So there you have it. A window into the wicked, slightly creepy but oh-so-sexy mind of everyone's favorite Irish vampire, Angelus._

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